The last annual review of ILGA-Europe, the European LGBT umbrella organization, praises most Balkan countries for the laws that they have introduced – but implementation is still poor and further steps are needed To some extent, the state of rights of LGBT people is better in the Balkan countries than in countries like Italy. This is what argues the last annual review of ILGA-Europe , the umbrella organization that gathers European LGBT movements. To build its index, ILGA takes into account a number of legislative parameters, including the existence of norms on non-discrimination, family relations and homo- and transphobia. The…
Author: Lorenzo Ferrari
Lorenzo Ferrari
PhD in Political history at the IMT Institute for Advanced Studies (Lucca), after a BA in Cultures and human rights and an MA in History at the University of Bologna. His main areas of expertise are European political integration and human rights; in 2016 he published the monograph Sometimes Speaking with a Single Voice. He has been working for years as an editor and author for publishing companies and as a collaborator of Il Post and VoxEurop. He works for OBCT since 2017. He tweets as @lorferr .
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In the countries of south-east Europe, the suicide rate in prisons is somewhat lower than the European average. If we look at the period between 2011 and 2015, the Balkans had an average of 53 cases of suicide for every 100,000 prisoners each year, while for the rest of Europe that average was 87. The data is recorded annually by the Council of Europe and published after a process of detailed scrutiny, to ensure reliability; data on Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo is not currently available. Furthermore, in the Balkans there is a relatively small difference difference between the suicide rate among…
Over the last decade, Bulgaria and Romania are experiencing a very significant decrease in the risk of poverty and social exclusion. The situation is improving above all in provincial towns. EU accession brings improvements to the quality of life of member states’ citizens, notably the least well-off. That’s what seems to be confirmed by the most recent data on the risk of poverty and social exclusion in Europe, which analyses the extent to which the situation for the least wealthy is connected to the national well-being. This data provides an alternative parameter to GDP per capita, which only describes the…