Civica Mobilitas grantees at the third Networking Meeting

“In the past period, we have seen that when there is a transparent and inclusive civil society, even the ethnic division becomes smaller and different communities could act for their joint cause. We have seen the power of this cooperation during the Color Revolution, but even more, during the last election processes when we noticed massive inter-ethnic voting.” With these words, the Swiss Ambassador, Her Excellency Sybille Suter Tejada opened the third Networking Meeting of the Civica Mobilitas grantees.

Today (24 October 2017) in Ohrid, 186 representatives of civil society organizations supported by the program in the past three years gathered together to exchange knowledge and experiences and to discuss how to make the change that they make in the society, more visible.

Besides the identification and visualization of the changes in each target group they work with, today and tomorrow, the participants will discuss with Mike Zuijderduijn about the international practices of monitoring and evaluation of civil society organizations and about the improvement of communication of their achievements.

О

The representatives of All for Fair Trails, Zelena Lupa (Green Magnifying Glass), SCOOP, Association of Journalists of Macedonia, and Macedonian Young Lawyers Association shared with the others the changes they made by their work.

Zaklina Hadzi-Zafirova from SCOOP – Center for Investigative Journalism said that the citizens did not recognize the organization, but its products. As the most important stories, she selected the investigation of the property of the four biggest political parties, investigation of the MPs’ costs for transport to their working places, investigation of the representation costs of the ministries, as well as the medical waste in the Macedonian hospitals.

Dragan Sekulovski from the Association of Journalists of Macedonia presented their case related to the event when the journalists were thrown out of the Parliament on 24 December. “We reacted to the competent institutions, but we did not receive any support. The response we received was that the Constitution was not breached. After two years, we reacted to the Court in Strasbourg, and it decided that the Articles 10 and 6 of the European Convention for Human Rights Protection was breached.” As a result of this ruling, which is one of the rare ones in Europe, the journalists got encouraged to request court protection more frequently.