Presentation of guidelines and public advocacy

On May 04, 2023 within the project Contribution of the Academic Community to the Protection of Human Rights in BiH implemented by the University of Business Engineering and Management and the Association for Democratic Initiatives, with the financial support of the European Union, a workshop Presentation of Guidelines and Public Advocacy was held in Tuzla.

The presentation of the guidelines for the actions of security institutions in accordance with the protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression, the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and the right to freedom of movement was attended by representatives of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Tuzla Canton and the Brčko District Police.

A set of five guidelines was developed as part of the project in order to advance the policy of protecting the human right to freedom of opinion and expression, the human right to freedom of peaceful assembly and the human right to freedom of movement in Bosnia and Herzegovina. In this way, extensive quantitative and qualitative research was carried out on the domestic legal framework and practices of the security institutions, primarily the police and courts, and identified and mapped certain shortcomings and vagueness of the domestic regulations, as well as the shortcomings of the internal procedures and instructions for the actions of these institutions, which in the previous period resulted in a considerable number of institutional violations of the three mentioned human rights.

In order to improve the situation in this field, and to increase the level of protection of given human rights, a set of guidelines for the actions of security institutions was created:

1. Guidelines for the application of police powers in cases of peaceful assembly;
2. Guidelines for the use of force against perpetrators of offenses in the area of public order and peace;
3. Guidelines for practicing legal reasoning and argumentation skills;
4. Guidelines for discovering and proving the so-called fake news;
5. Guidelines for implementing the practice of the European Court of Human Rights in the work of security institutions (police and courts) on the issue of freedom of opinion and expression, freedom of peaceful assembly and freedom of movement.

As part of the advocacy with the participants of the workshop, it was once again pointed out in which segments it is necessary to harmonize the law on public order and peace and the law on peaceful assembly of citizens with the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms and its protocols as well as the practice of the European Court of Human Rights.