Publications

This report highlights the impact of activities carried out by the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) in 2024.

Presentation report based on the findings of the Trial Monitoring Programme in Ukraine carried out in 2017 by the Centre of Policy and Legal Reform within “Safeguarding Human Rights through Courts” project of the OSCE Project Co-ordinator in Ukraine with the financial support of the Government of Canada. The report is available only in Ukrainian.

The Handbook consolidates key aspects of social detention facilities monitoring in the framework of the national preventive mechanism (NPM) in Ukraine. It describes specific features of private social care institutions, psychiatric hospitals, orphanages and geriatric boarding centres of social and psychological rehabilitation for children. The Handbook provides recommendations on how to conduct interviews with different groups of clients, describes the types of documents that shall be examined, and outlines with with principles a monitor must comply. The publication will be useful for NPM monitors, social detention facilities staff, civic activists and all those interested in the problems of ill-treatment prevention in closed institutions in Ukraine. The handbook is available only in Ukrainian.

The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) is proud to release a practical resource designed to empower law enforcement officers, prosecutors, and stakeholders in tackling cryptocurrency-related crimes. The guide "Decoding Crypto Crime: A Guide for Law Enforcement" simplifies complex concepts like blockchain technology and virtual assets, offering best practices for investigating common crypto crimes such as investment scams, extortion, and phishing.

The main objective of the ARC Project, fully consistent with the priorities set by the BiH Strategy for the Fight against Corruption 2015-2019, is to support the host country’s judiciary in enhancing the effectiveness of judicial response to corruption in compliance with international standards and practices. The OSCE Mission to Bosnia and Herzegovina (the Mission) is implementing the project with funding from the US Department of State’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs (INL).

The OSCE participating States have agreed to several commitments that specifically mandate the Organization’s structures to assist participating States with developing programmes aimed at preventing all forms of gender-based violence, as outlined in the 2004 Action Plan for the Promotion of Gender Equality, and OSCE Ministerial Council decisions from 2005, 2014 and 2018 which emphasize the importance of collecting and disseminating reliable, disaggregated data on violence against women, alongside efforts to criminalize gender-based violence. Femicide, the gender-related killing of women and girls, is a global phenomenon and represents the most extreme manifestation of violence against women. This report aims to assess the response to femicide across the 57 OSCE participating States, focusing on three key areas: the criminal justice response, the collection of comparable data, and the reporting and analysis of femicide.

This paper is a summary of the first of a series of roundtable discussions that aim to identify opportunities for law enforcement to harness new technologies to support its work, help formulate policy recommendations and explore potential OSCE capacity-building support in this area. The first event of this series was dedicated to the topic of harnessing new technologies to enhance crime analysis, and focused on opportunities and challenges in deploying artificial intelligence (AI) for analysis and the potential impact of these technologies on human rights.

The advancement of gender equality aims to ensure equal rights and opportunities for women and men, as well as the just distribution of power and resources. Gender equality should enable both women and men to shape politics, and it is increasingly accepted that politics and decision-making processes should embrace the participation and contribution of the people they affect. To secure truly transformative change towards gender equality, there is now an urgent need to engage male politicians meaningfully in gender equality work, forging more just and equitable political institutions that work for all.

The Methodology for monitoring of Ukrainian courts’ judgements on their application of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and the case-law of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) was developed by the OSCE Project Co-ordinator in Ukraine (PCU) within its “Safeguarding Human Rights through Courts” project. The project’s two-fold objective was to strengthen civil society’s capacity to monitor the application of human rights protection legal instruments in court judgements and to establish a baseline and evaluate the progress in application of the ECHR and the case-law of the ECtHR by PCU-trained judges. PCU’s Implementing Partner – “Institute of Applied Humanitarian Research” – used the developed methodology to pilot the monitoring of judgements during 2015-2016. The analysis of monitoring findings will be made available in a separate report in November 2017.

First report prepared by the OSCE Presence in Albania assessing the legal framework and work of the Albanian administrative justice system