Category: Activism

Platform B: Amplifying Strong and Credible SEE Voices

Posted on by BIRD

Together with our partners, BIRN is launching a series of online and offline events aimed to amplify the voices of strong and credible individuals and organisations in the region that promote the core values of democracy, such as civic engagement, independent institutions, transparency and rule of law.

As a primarily media organisation, we want to open space and provide a platform to discuss and reshape our alliances in light of the challenges facing democracies in South-East and Central Europe.

This effort comes at a critical time when the region is seeing several troubling trends: centralized power, reduced transparency, assaults on media, politicized judiciaries, unchecked corruption, online violations and social polarization – all amidst heightened geopolitical tensions and deep divisions in Europe.

Due to the ongoing pandemic, Platform B event series will be organised in accordance with all relevant health measures. As the situation improves, we hope to be able to host some of the events in BIRN spaces in Sarajevo and Belgrade, and elsewhere in the region.

The Platform B will be an opportunity for individuals and groups to meet monthly on selected topics.

Illustration: Marta Klawe Rzeczy

Opening event: Digital Rights Falter Amid Political and Social Unrest: What Now?

Date: 1 July, 2021 (Thursday)

Time: 15.00, CET

At this event, BIRN and SHARE Foundation will discuss its annual digital rights report,together with other members of the newly established SEE Network, talking about the key trends concerning the digital ecosystem.

We monitored digital rights in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Hungary, North Macedonia, Romania and Serbia and collected more than 1500 cases of online violations.

In Southern and Eastern Europe, where online disinformation campaigns are endangering guaranteed individual freedoms, and while the decline in internet safety has become a worrying trend, citizens with poor media and digital illiteracy have been left without viable protection mechanisms.

The event participants will have an opportunity to discuss and hear reflections from representatives of: EDRi, Zasto ne?, Citizen D, Homo Digitalis, SCiDEV, Partners Serbia, Metamorphosis, Atina NGO, Media Development Center.

More information and registration

Second event: Freedom of Information in the Balkans: Classified, Rejected, Delayed

Date: July 15, 2021 (Thursday)

Time: 14.00, CET

The global pandemic has been used as an excuse for many Balkan states to not fully implement freedom of information laws, leaving the public in the dark.

Transparency has been another victim of the COVID-19 pandemic.

While on paper, freedom of information laws are up-to-date in almost all countries in the region, implementation is patchy at best and has grown worse since governments clamped down on the flow of information with the onset of the coronavirus.

Together with journalists, public information officers and colleagues from Open Government Partnership we will reflect on the findings of BIRN’s tracking institutional transparency report and offer recommendations on how to make our institutions open and accountable.

Registration form will be available here soon.

Events in August and in the fall will focus on investigative journalism and gender justice.

The Life and Times of Red Mud Reservoir № VII

Posted on by BIRD

The Life and Times of Red Mud Reservoir № VII’ is a collaboration between an anthropologist (Ian M. Cook) and a graphic artist/illustrator (Gyula Németh) about a bauxite tailings storage facility in the settlement of Almásfüzitő, Hungary. It is based on the investigative story previously published by the Atlatzo.

It is one output from the project ‘Black Waters’, a hybrid investigative-research and advocacy project that responds to the need for engaging reporting on environmental damage, corruption and the consequences for social justice in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). Over twelve months, a team of researchers, journalists and audio-visual artists developed novel multimodal methodologies, conducted mixed-methods research, and reported their findings.

Project is run by the Center for Media, Data and Society at the Central European University in partnership with Atlatszo and the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network. It was supported by the Open Society Initiative for Europe. The research team further included Alexandra Czeglédi (research assistant), Gabriella Horn (investigative journalist) and Márta Vetier (researcher). 

The non-public figures who appear in the following pages are composite characters based on interviews in the settlement. They are not intended to represent real people. The story is narrated by the reservoir itself and covers the historical, political, theoretical, cultural and social aspects of Red Mud Reservoir № VII and those who live in its vicinity.

Croatia Accused of Slurring Watchdogs in Police Violence Dispute

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Human rights organisations have accused the Croatian Ministry of Interior of resorting to slurs, after it rejected media reports of police tagging migrants and refugees who attempted to enter Croatia from Bosnia with paint.

“As a diversion tactic, the crudely written response by the MUP [Interior Ministry] simply used slurs and unfounded allegations against the reporting organisations and journalists,” two watchdog organisations, No Name Kitchen, NNK, and Border Violence Monitoring Network, BVMN, said on Thursday in a joint press release.

“Instead of dealing with these grave allegations and initiating an investigation, the Croatian MUP has fallen back on its traditional stance of denying all existence of violent removals from its territory and ignoring the photographic evidence and witness accounts,” they said.

The latest report by the BVMN and NNK said EU border countries like Croatia were continuing their established practice of conducting illegal “pushbacks” of migrants and refugees trying to enter from Bosnia and Serbia – with the additional use of paint.

“A relatively new development in pushback practices is the tagging of groups with orange spray paint,” BVMN said, referring to two events at the beginning of May, when migrant groups attempted to enter Croatia from Bosnia.

After the case was reported in the international media, including the UK Guardian, Croatia denied the allegations on Wednesday, stating that the BWMN “regularly publishes accusations against the Croatian police and the Republic of Croatia, as well as all other countries on the Balkan migrant route”.

“The fabrication that migrants are marked [with a spray] in the sign of the cross because of their faith demonstrates the authors’ ignorance and a premeditated attack against Croatia without any knowledge of the basic facts,” the Interior Ministry said, adding that it had “immediately conducted an urgent investigation with the help of our police administrations”.

“It has been established that along the border with Bosnia and Herzegovina which has been indicated, the Croatian Police did not conduct any [such] activities towards migrants,” the ministry said.

The watchdog organisations meanwhile concluded that they will “continue to carry out their work as independent monitors, tracking and reporting on the unfolding situation at EU external borders”.

Serbia’s Anti-Govt Protests Leave Tweeters Bitterly Divided

Posted on by BIRD

As anti-government protests continue in Serbia – and as the mainstream media mostly follows the government line – Twitter has become a significant battlefield where it’s still possible to freely exchange opinions. 

With that in mind, Milos Resimic, a Ph.D. candidate at Central European University and a consultant at Government Transparency Institute, has collected 10-20,000 tweets after each week and has analyzed the structure of the network.

The weekly anti-government protests started on December 8, 2018. On March 16, citizens stormed the building of the Serbian national broadcaster RTS , and were forcefully expelled by police.

Resimic’s analysis of last weekend’s protests, which turned violent, showed that while the Twitter community focused on the same topic, there was little if any conversation between the opposed groups.

It revealed a clear polarization and the lack of communication between the pro-government users, shown above in green, and the anti-government communities, shown in yellow.

The anti-government community is bigger, more inter-connected and diverse than the pro-government community as reflected in Resimic interactive graph.

“We can notice that opposition politicians and the accounts of opposition parties are important for information diffusion in the anti-government community. This community is diverse and highly inter-connected. This is completely different from the pro-government community, which is highly centralized around two or three users,” he explained.

This motivated Resimic to look in more detail at the pro-government users, so he scraped 6,000 tweets of 30 randomly selected users. The resulting network was almost entirely based on retweets – 98.6 percent – which he said indicates bot-like behavior.

Resimic also highlighted that some independent media, including Balkan Insight, are also visible in the network.

“Balkan Insight forms a separate cluster (blue), and their reports about the protests tend to be retweeted the most by their own cluster (mostly non-Serbian speaking audience), but also by the anti-government cluster and to a lesser extent by the pro-government cluster,” he said.

“Prominent, especially in the last protest network, is KRIK, which was praised in the online community for its professional coverage of the protest,” he concluded, referring to the investigative journalism network.

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