News and press releases

The OSCE Programme Office in Nur-Sultan supported a series of online discussions as part of the “Newcomer Fest on Human Rights”, which was launched on 27 October 2020. The Fest will see a number of awareness-raising and learning activities held for local community representatives on the importance of human rights and their protection.

The OSCE Project Co-ordinator in Uzbekistan organized a training course for judges from 22 to 24 October 2020 on best practices and challenges in the field of countering gender-based violence, and State and judicial responses to combating domestic violence and human trafficking amid the COVID-19 pandemic...

KYIV, 26 October 2020 – Ukraine’s local elections were conducted under a substantially revised legal framework which, despite some improvements, requires further refinement to address remaining shortcomings, international observers from the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) said in a statement today. The Central Election Commission administered the elections professionally and efficiently, despite the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic, but the work of territorial commissions was often politicized, and was negatively affected by frequent replacements of their members.

A three-day online training course for over 70 practitioners from the five Central Asian states on the effective investigation of crimes committed in cyberspace and with the use of digital technologies concluded on 23 October 2020. The event was organized by the OSCE Secretariat’s Transnational Threats Department jointly with the UN Office of Counter-Terrorism- UN Centre for Counter-Terrorism (UNCCT- UNOCT), and the UN Regional Centre for Preventive Diplomacy in Central Asia (UNRCCA) with the support of the OSCE field operations in Central Asia...

COPENHAGEN, 22 October 2020 – Exiled Belarusian opposition figure Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya visited the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly’s International Secretariat today and met with OSCE PA Secretary General Roberto Montella. The visit was on the margins of a broader programme of meetings in the Danish capital and served as an opportunity to follow up on a web dialogue hosted by the PA on 23 September 2020 with OSCE PA Bureau members, Tsikhanouskaya, and Belarusian Head of Delegation Andrei Savinykh...

A training course on the concepts and techniques of crime analysis for the Albanian State Police, organized by the OSCE Presence in Albania, was held from 20 to 23 October 2020 in Tirana...

The OSCE Programme Office in Nur-Sultan in co-operation with the Supreme Court, the NGO Legal Media Centre, Internews Kazakhstan and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) organized an online seminar on the protection of freedom of expression and the judicial regulation of defamation on 22 October 2020. Fifty-eight judges of the Supreme Court and the city courts of Nur-Sultan, Almaty, Shymkent and regions (oblasts) throughout the country participated in the seminar...