First meeting of OSCE Advisory and Co-ordination Board for combating gender-based violence in South-Eastern Europe

On 9 and 10 September 2021, the OSCE convened the first meeting of the Advisory and Co-ordination Board established as part of the OSCE project, Enhancing Criminal Justice Capacities for Combating Gender-based Violence — GBV — in South-Eastern Europe.

Representatives of the OSCE and its field operations, the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR), the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), United Nations Women, the Council of Europe and donor countries, Germany and Finland, attended the meeting.

The aim of the meeting was to exchange good practices and lessons learned from previous and on-going initiatives on preventing and combating gender-based violence in the region, as well as identify synergies, with a focus on avoiding overlapping and strengthening sustainability of results.

The project aims at enhancing the capacities of criminal justice systems in Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, North Macedonia and Serbia to prevent and combat gender-based violence toward increasing the public’s trust in criminal justice response and the level of reporting of gender-based violence cases. The project is currently being implemented with the financial support of Germany, Norway and Finland.