Balkan News

As the number of migrants crossing the Balkans continues to rise, the EU’s border guard agency Frontex is to upgrade cooperation with Serbia, where officials have complained that the migrant issue is becoming too much to handle.

Balkan states cooperate well with international partners on counter-terrorism – but face a lack of resources and in problems of cooperation between institutions, the latest US State Department report says. 

Bosnian Serbs demanding action over the unsolved killing of David Dragicevic shifted their daily protests on Wednesday night to the front of the police department in Banja Luka.

The visit by Russia’s top diplomat may have a major impact on Bosnia’s political scene, coming amidst an especially heated pre-election campaign.

After censuring Hungary, Brussels is upping the pressure on Bucharest over its policies on the rule of law and corruption.

Refugee children are being welcomed into local schools in the cities Sarajevo and Mostar – but in other parts of Bosnia, the authorities appear much more reluctant to let this process get underway.  

The integration of the courts in the north into the Kosovo judicial system has failed to resolve the problem of delayed trials and stalled cases – and may have made it worse, experts fear.

A new report on the mass resignation of Serbian members from the Kosovo Security Force blames the Serbian government and accuses it of 'brutal interference' in a Kosovo institution.

Three Chinese companies have announced they are pulling out from the planned construction of a thermal power plant in Bosnia, after Federation entity lawmakers failed to approve it in time.

Former Bosnian Serb soldier Vuk Ratkovic was sentenced to eight years in prison for the repeated rape of a woman in Visegrad during the war in 1992 and 1993.

A number of Bulgarian, Romanian and Croatian MEPs backed Hungary in the European Parliament motion condemning its perceived breaches of core EU values.

A UN Human Rights Council working group said that four Balkan countries have made little progress in depoliticising the issue of resolving the fate of missing persons from the 1990s wars.

Former police officers Dusan Kuzmanovic, Predrag Markocevic and Marinko Djukic were charged with committing crimes against humanity for allegedly persecuting Bosniaks and Croats in the town of Teslic in 1992.

In his last state of the union address, the European Commission chief said that if the EU does not unite to shape the destiny of the Western Balkans, 'others' will step in and do so instead. 

Convicted war criminal Tomislav Mercep has been allowed to spend more than a month out of prison recuperating at a spa – a decision that Croatia’s veterans’ affairs minister said he supported.

Historical revisionists in Croatia and Ukraine are selectively quoting archive sources to politically whitewash their country’s involvement in Nazi collaboration and other World War II crimes.

Data comparing life expectancy in the EU show that women in Romania and Bulgaria die much younger on average than women in France and Spain.

Global anti-corruption watchdog Transparency International put Bulgaria among the countries in which there is “little or no enforcement” deterring foreign companies from paying bribes.

The 62-old-year lawmaker in Bosnia’s state parliament, who is banned from US, has long faced allegations of financial impropriety.

Romanians are to vote next month on a definition of what constitutes a family, after parliament passed a bill allowing a plebiscite on whether to change the constitution to ban same-sex marriage.