Balkan News

The announcement that a monument dedicated to the Albanian historical hero Skenderbeg will be built in Montenegro has yet again opened up a debate in the country about his origins.

A furious row about the ‘Istanbul Convention’ to prevent violence against women has overshadowed protests for social justice in Bulgaria, while the non-ratification of the convention will ensure that injustice continues.

The number of Serbs interested in joining the Kosovo Police remains consistent, officials said, despite reports that Serbs have been asking to quit the Kosovo Security Force amid political tensions.

Amid fears that the national script is losing out to Latin letters, Serbia’s Culture Ministry is proposing changing the law to better protect its use.

Twenty-three years after Croatia’s victorious military operation ‘Storm’, the Croatian judiciary has only prosecuted a handful of war crimes cases, while Serbia has failed to launch its own investigations.

After President Hashim Thaci’s statement that Kosovo will eventually make a ‘border correction’ with Serbia, opposition MP Ilir Deda accused him of using semantics to make an exchange of territories more acceptable to the public.

A total of 25 bodies of people suspected to have died in World War II or the post-war period were exhumed in the Croatian capital in July, officials said.

A Serbian court fined eight activists from the Youth Initiative for Human Rights for interrupting a speech by convicted war criminal Veselin Sljivancanin in January 2017.

The UN court in The Hague rejected a call from Bosnian Serb Army commander Ratko Mladic’s defence to reconsider a previous decision to refuse to launch proceedings against medics at its detention unit.

Ousted from the White House, Steve Bannon is trying to help right-wing populists take power in Europe.

One of the most famous musicians in the former Yugoslavia, Oliver Dragojevic, has died on Sunday at the age of 71.

Serbian lawyer Dragoslav Ognjanovic was shot dead on Saturday in front of his apartment in Belgrade.

The Belgrade-based Humanitarian Law Centre, an NGO, said Serbia seems to be stalling on the prosecution of war criminals – hoping 'time will do its work,' as witnesses and culprits pass away.

Demaci spent 28 years in various prisons in former Yugoslavia for his passionate advocacy of Kosovo Albanian rights, later becoming a symbol of the national independence struggle – despite which he remained a sworn opponent of the politics of revenge and national hatred.

Country's top court rules that convention against violence against women would be anti-constitutional, making its adoption by parliament almost impossible.

Kosovo high state officials and citizens paid homage to lifelong political activist Adem Demaci, nicknamed ‘Kosovo’s Mandela’, after he passed away in Pristina on Thursday aged 82.

Moldova's ruling Democratic Party delayed the next parliamentary elections, scheduled for autumn 2018, to early 2019 – after rushing through a package of highly controversial laws.

Montenegro has come up with another plan to offer citizenship to foreigners ready to invest in the country, as part of a move to reverse the recent drop in FDI.

Advocacy groups and law experts say it is disturbing that far-right MPs in Serbia suffer no consequences for hate speech and other inflammatory actions – even when they break the law.

Moldova's pro-Russian President, Igor Dodon, says he would sooner be suspended – again – than permit the US embassy to have a bigger site than the Russian embassy in Chisinau.