Novak Stjepanovic was sentenced to 13 years in prison in Serbia for war crimes in Bosnia in 1992, but he had already skipped the country to join Russian forces fighting in Ukraine, a BIRN ...

Varna's opposition mayor Blagomir Kotsev – whose arrest in July on corruption charges sparked angry demonstrations – has been released after supporters raised the hefty bail sum in hours. Varna mayor ...

Proton was built on the principle that data should not be treated as a commodity, says CEO Andy Yen. A decade on, over 100 million users seem to agree. Andy Yen recalls being laughed at by investors ...

A recent mass shooting at a school in Belgrade had a widespread impact online in the Balkans, sparking a series of copycat threats, misleading articles, fake video footage and insensitive reports in ...

All 35 defendants and the representatives of the three companies who are being tried for the deadly fire at the Pulse nightclub in Kocani in March pleaded not guilty. Hearings start for one of the ...

Former communist countries in Southeast Europe face catastrophic depopulation, with far-reaching social and political consequences. Young people are leaving. Fertility rates have collapsed. Societies ...

Veterans of the Dutch UN peacekeeping battalion deployed in Srebrenica remember how they were left powerless to prevent the genocide of Bosniaks by Bosnian Serb forces in July 1995 - and how the ...

Police investigations reveal that organised crime groups often use ordinary people and passenger transport agencies to smuggle their illegal profits from EU countries and elsewhere back into Albania.

From the BIRN archives: After the death of nationalist leader Milosevic in 2006 while he was on trial for war crimes, Gordana Igric explained how he was not the only man responsible for the malign ...

BIRN’s analysis of the situation in Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia and Serbia shows how mainstream politicians and other prominent public figures have used ...

Greek police busted a Pakistani human trafficking group exploiting Nepalese agricultural migrant workers who were allegedly forced into debt, given exhausting tasks, threatened and sometimes ...

Research into verdicts handed down by the Hague war crime tribunal and domestic courts in the former Yugoslavia shows previously unresearched links between wartime sexual violence and trafficking - as ...