Publications

To evade prosecution, organized crime groups are increasingly targeting recruitment efforts towards young people under the age of criminal liability. The COVID-19 pandemic and security developments across the OSCE area exacerbated socio-economic vulnerabilities and risk factors, making young people more susceptible to being recruited into criminal networks and activities. This can put them on a path to long-term criminality, with significant consequences for themselves, victims, criminal justice systems and society as a whole. Research shows that by the age of 25, a single “multiple offender” has had – on average – 100 victims and generated EUR 1.7 million in social follow-up costs.1 Investing in effective youth crime prevention and strengthening youth resilience from an early age therefore have major economic and societal benefits, and contribute to good governance and the rule of law. This report builds on the OSCE’s longstanding focus on youth development and crime prevention, emphasizing the need for targeted strategies to mitigate vulnerabilities. The OSCE’s commitment to promoting the role and inclusion of youth in its security agenda dates back to its founding document, the Helsinki Final Act, and has been strengthened though many subsequent OSCE decisions. The OSCE’s mandate in combating organized crime underscores prevention as a key approach, as reaffirmed in the 2020 Tirana Declaration, which calls for a multi-stakeholder and gender-sensitive response.

The Property Rights Monitor is a bi-annual publication of the observations of OSCE field monitoring Kosovo wide and aims to provide an overview of the situation in the field of property and housing rights of non-majority community members and displaced persons.

The OSCE Mission in Kosovo invites women from all communities who are passionate about improving security, fostering dialogue, and collaborating with Women’s Security Networks to apply for a training on public dialogue facilitation, organized in co-operation with the Nansen Center for Peace and Dialogue.

The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) is proud to release a practical resource designed to empower law enforcement officers, prosecutors, and stakeholders in tackling cryptocurrency-related crimes. The guide "Decoding Crypto Crime: A Guide for Law Enforcement" simplifies complex concepts like blockchain technology and virtual assets, offering best practices for investigating common crypto crimes such as investment scams, extortion, and phishing.

Adults and children from any cultural, socio-economic, ethnic and religious background can become victims of trafficking in human beings (THB). Victims may have had nurturing families, access to secondary and tertiary education or professional careers before being trafficked, but understanding any pre-existing vulnerabilities should also give a better understanding of the categories of people most often targeted by traffickers.

This report highlights the impact of activities carried out by the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) in 2024.

The OSCE participating States have agreed to several commitments that specifically mandate the Organization’s structures to assist participating States with developing programmes aimed at preventing all forms of gender-based violence, as outlined in the 2004 Action Plan for the Promotion of Gender Equality, and OSCE Ministerial Council decisions from 2005, 2014 and 2018 which emphasize the importance of collecting and disseminating reliable, disaggregated data on violence against women, alongside efforts to criminalize gender-based violence. Femicide, the gender-related killing of women and girls, is a global phenomenon and represents the most extreme manifestation of violence against women. This report aims to assess the response to femicide across the 57 OSCE participating States, focusing on three key areas: the criminal justice response, the collection of comparable data, and the reporting and analysis of femicide.

Launched in 2021, the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) CHANGE project employs a transformative approach to promoting gender equality, women’s human rights and safety. It integrates a broad range of elements from across ODIHR's mandate to address obstacles to achieving gender equality.

This paper is a summary of the first of a series of roundtable discussions that aim to identify opportunities for law enforcement to harness new technologies to support its work, help formulate policy recommendations and explore potential OSCE capacity-building support in this area. The first event of this series was dedicated to the topic of harnessing new technologies to enhance crime analysis, and focused on opportunities and challenges in deploying artificial intelligence (AI) for analysis and the potential impact of these technologies on human rights.