News and press releases

Key findings from the OSCE Mission to BiH shed light on the need for significant improvements in the witness support system to ensure access to justice and provide quality psychological and administrative support for witnesses and victims.

SKOPJE, 25 April 2024 – North Macedonia’s presidential election campaign was competitive and fundamental freedoms including media freedom were respected, but important areas of the presidential contest that included campaign rules, access to the media, and allocation of state funding are not regulated, undermining the key principle of legal certainty, international observers said in a statement today.

On April 22, Secretary General Helga Maria Schmid welcomed mentees of the second edition of the OSCE Women’s Peace Leadership Programme, in Vienna. This high-level mentorship programme supporting women’s inclusion in peace and security at all levels will run from October 2023 to June 2024 and provide 16 women peacebuilders from across the OSCE region with extensive training on leadership, mediation and dialogue facilitation.

On 23 and 24 April, the OSCE’s Transnational Threats Department (TNTD) and the Office of the Co-ordinator of OSCE Economic and Environmental Activities (OCEEA), in co-operation with the Programme Office in Dushanbe, held multi-stakeholder workshops with young people, influencers and governmental practitioners to discuss how to use social media as a platform to raise the awareness and resilience of young people on involvement in crime.

To combat the “digital information disorder”, which refers to misinformation, disinformation, and malign information in the digital realm, the OSCE Transnational Threats Department, together with the National Counter-Terrorism Council of Mongolia (NCTC), organized a regional expert-level conference in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia on 23 and 24 April: “Addressing the Prevailing Digital Information Disorder: Countering the Use of the Internet by Terrorists and Violent Extremists”.

It will not be possible to observe the upcoming elections in Lithuania as the invitation extended to the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) was made conditional on the exclusion of nationals from certain OSCE states, in breach of the commitments made by all

From April 15 to April 19, 2024, 20 border guard officials undertook a training course titled ‘Storage of Ammunition in an Ammunition Bunker Site’ in Osh, Kyrgyz Republic. This course aimed to enhance the storage practices of ammunition in bunker sites according to the International Ammunition Technical Guidance (IATG).