No LGBT+ Pride march took place this year in Serbia either, the country that saw the toughest freedom of movement restrictions in the region.
This especially affected older people who for months were allowed out of their homes only to visit doctors, recalled Milena Vasic, a lawyer at the YUCOM Lawyers’ Committee for Human Rights.
“We find this discriminatory, and it also caused other human rights violations, especially the right to labour, health care and others,” Vasic said. The same downward trend in rights was noticeable in Bosnia and Herzegovina and in Croatia, experts said.
The pandemic at the same time saw an exponential rise in executive powers, jeopardizing people’s access to justice and the right to a fair trial. This was an especially worrying development in Serbia, where trials are often seen as politically influenced.
There was also a rise of cases of disinformation, panic and causing disorder, but without clear rules around making arrests or pressing charges. Vasic said authorities in Serbia sometimes imposed draconian sentences of up to three years in prison for what appeared to be minor violations.
Across the region, the responses of governents to the challenges raised by the pandemic appeared unplanned, sporadic and often improvised, as well as lacking independent oversight, said Ivan Novosel, Director of Programs at Human Rights House in Zagreb, Croatia.
He said this approach was especially visible in education, exposing big inequalities in education after schooling moved online, when continued access to education depended on technology that only certain groups or individuals had access to, or that parents could provide to children – the so-called “digital divide.”
“This trend [towards inequality] was most visible in elementary schools and with parents who had limited capacities to provide enough, or any, computers,” Novosel explained.
Danilo Curcic, from the Belgrade-based A11 Initiative, a non-government organisation that promotes the rights of marginalised communities, said the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic would be visible mostly in the realm of economic and social rights.
“This goes from education to access to welfare, to housing, etc,” he said. “In our context it will be important to start thinking about the ways we can challenge these policies, from the perspective of the intersectionality of economic and social and civil and political rights,” he underlined.
Refugees and migrants across the Balkans were particularly deprived of rights, especially in Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, where accommodation centres were transformed into detention centres.
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October 13, 2020 at 07:12PM
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Civil Society Filled a Void in the Balkan Pandemic - Balkan Insight
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