News and press releases

VIENNA, 11 May 2023- The current setbacks in media freedom in the OSCE region are not isolated incidents, but are closely linked to the larger political and social contexts in which they occur stated Representative on Freedom of the Media (RFoM) Teresa Ribeiro today during the presentation of her bi-annual report to the OSCE Permanent Council.

A three-day training course on strengthening North Macedonia’s capacity to implement targeted financial sanction regimes concluded today in Veles, North Macedonia. The training was jointly organized by the OSCE Secretariat’s Transnational Threats Department and the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), with the support of the OSCE Mission to Skopje.

An OSCE-organized three-day training course on counteracting trafficking in human beings for facilitators from Women’s Resource Centres (WRCs) concluded on 28 April 2023 in Dushanbe.

Twenty officers of the Tajik Border Troops completed the training course on operational planning on 5 May 2023 in Dushanbe. The OSCE Programme Office in Dushanbe (OSCE) organized the course in co-operation with the Tajik Border Troops. The training course was conducted in the framework of OSCE's project Patrol Field Capacity Building of the Tajik Border Troops through Promotion of Regional Co-operation- Phase II, financed by the Republic of France.

United States mid-term elections The November mid-term congressional elections were competitive and professionally managed, with voters actively taking part. Candidates could campaign freely, but the tone was highly polarized and the campaign negatively impacted by harsh rhetoric. In many cases,

Ahead of the upcoming parliamentary elections, the OSCE Mission to Montenegro partnered with representatives from media self-regulatory bodies in Montenegro to draft a Manual on effective media reporting during election campaigns with 22 concrete recommendations in line with OSCE and international standards, and the Code of Ethics for Montenegrin Journalists.

The Regional Forum "E-commerce in handicraft as a driver of key changes in women's entrepreneurship in Central Asia", held on 5-6 May 2023 in Termez, Uzbekistan, provided a platform to discuss the role information technology (IT) and digital solutions play in the development of the handicraft sector, in particular for businesswomen. The Forum, organized by the International Business Women Association of Uzbekistan (IBWA) in co-operation with the OSCE Project Co-ordinator in Uzbekistan (PCUz), brought together around 130 women entrepreneurs from Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan, as well as Afghan women established in Uzbekistan.