News

Forced evictions of Roma people from their only homes, serious regression in the field of women's rights and the collapse of media freedom are part of the topics on focus

Over 80 members of the Legal Experts Advisory Panel (LEAP) – the European network of criminal defence lawyers, academics, and NGO activists fighting to uphold the right to a fair trial in their national jurisdictions – coming from 26 countries of the EU will descend on Sofia to discuss a host of critical challenges in the fight to ensure that fundamental human rights are respected in European criminal justice systems and to plan how to overcome them.

Krassimir Kanev, the chairman of the Bulgarian Helsinki Committee​, analyses the role of human rights in the Bulgarian government's Programme for the Presidency of the Council of the European Union.

In September 2017, the CNRS (Laboratories SAGE (Strasbourg) and CESDIP (Saint Quentin en Yvelines)) and the European Prison Litigation Network launched together with partner universities and NGOs from nine European countries a research project on the protection of fundamental rights and access to legal aid for remand prisoners in the European Union. This project is funded by the European Union’s Justice Programme for eighteen months.

On 20 December 2017, the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights will hear the case of Beuze v Belgium. Its decision in this case will have wide-ranging effects on the right to early access to a lawyer in criminal cases across Europe.

We, members of the Civic Solidarity Platform (CSP), believe that restricting civil society participation in the work of the OSCE would be a tremendous setback for the Helsinki process and a betrayal of the spirit and founding values of this unique peace advancement initiative.