Civic Initiatives: Serbian Civil Society Organizations Work in Unfavorable Setting

Civic Initiatives

Serbian civil society organizations (CSOs) work in a disadvantageous environment, which is not improving at all, but after ten years an initiative has been launched to set up a Council for Civil Society Development and Cooperation, a government body supposed to build a proper environment for the civil society and foster its communication with the state, Tara Petrovic of the Civic Initiatives has explained.

“Regressive processes have been reported in certain areas, the freedom of gathering for instance – last year’s environmental protests testified to it. In addition, different forms of abuse have been recorded in the contests for government funding of CSOs,” Petrovic said to BETA.

“Serbia is the only state in the region that does not have a body for cooperation with the civil society. Ten years ago an attempt was made at creating it, but there was no will to support it,” Petrovic said. She appealed to NGOs to join the process of establishing the Council en masse, explaining that it’s an institution all of them could benefit from.

The civil society activist underlined that the civil society in Serbia needed networking, but that it didn’t need to wait for the Council. It’s not necessary to wait for the Council to be installed or for the state to intervene for CSOs to begin to communicate, because communication and cooperation already existed.