Balkaninsight.com

In the first day of closing arguments in Ratko Mladic’s trial, prosecutors said the former Bosnian Serb military commander played a crucial role in a brutal plan to ‘cleanse’ areas of Bosnia of non-Serbs.

Former Bosnian Serb President Radovan Karadzic has filed an appeal challenging the Hague Tribunal’s verdict sentencing him to 40 years in prison for genocide and crimes against humanity.

The radical statements of the new leader of the main opposition party in Republika Srpksa suggest that he is trying to copy the hard-line Serbian nationalism of the entity's supremo, Milorad Dodik, with potentially worrying consequences for the country.

Serb politicians have condemned a memorial plaque with a fascist slogan which was installed by Croatian war veterans and right-wing politicians near the Jasenovac WWII concentration camp.

Albanian parties in Macedonia are focusing on standard ethnic issues in the December 11 election - while more pressing everyday problems that need solving are being left out, experts fear.

With two key laws in Albania's judicial reform process before the Constitutional Court, experts are urging the court not to stall the EU-mandated process unnecessarily.

Legal amendments banning the public display of communist symbols have angered communists across Europe and reawakened old disputes at home. 

Our team brings you live updates of the most important events and developments in the Balkans as they happen.

Serbian Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic has agreed to hear the grievances of leaders of the pro-Serbian opposition in Montenegro - who wish to inform him of their plight in the country.

Serbia's ruling party may call another snap parliamentary election to boost the chances of its candidate in the presidential election in spring 2017, a number of experts say.

The resignation of the head of Croatia's main ethics committee - who complained of his frustration - has highlighted the country's apparent inability to penalise plagiarism by top officials and academics.

Closing statements are beginning in the case against former Bosnian Serb military chief Ratko Mladic, as his four-and-a-half year trial for genocide and war crimes moves closer to its conclusion.

Despite astounding revelations of corruption and malpractice, Macedonia’s two ruling parties are likely to win the early elections in December for a combination of reasons.

Bullied or bought off, trade unions in Serbia and elsewhere in the former Yugoslavia have hit rock bottom, failing the workers they claim to protect.

A Hungarian ministerial decision that the country's diplomats should ignore Romania’s National Day celebrations on December 1 - because they mark Hungary's loss of Transylvania - has breathed new life into an old dispute.

Finding themselves in a minority for the first time since the 1995 massacre on the assembly of the town in eastern Bosnia, the main Bosnian Muslim party, the SDA, has failed to select a vice-president of the assembly.

After accusations of genocide, ethnic cleansing, brutal detentions and a punishing siege, lawyers in the four-year trial of Bosnian Serb military chief Ratko Mladic begin to present their closing arguments next week.

Top former and current officials in the Kosovo Tax Administration have admitted the extent of political influences on their work to BIRN Kosovo's TV show.

Tensions surrounding national and local elections say much about the state of democracy across the Balkans. But when senior European officials visit the region to lend support to proven authoritarian rulers, democracy campaigners can only look on in bewilderment. Read about this and much more in this week’s Premium Highlights. 

Ivica Dacic, Serbian foreign minister, said he ‘might have made a mistake’ when he walked out of a joint meeting of Visegrad Group and Western Balkan countries in Warsaw.