City Center for Social Work in Belgrade and Association Atina signed a Protocol on cooperation within the project “Support to the City Center for Social Work in Belgrade with implementing measures of social protection in providing protection to families with small children and unaccompanied migrant minors”, which is implemented and coordinated by the City Center, and financially supported by UNICEF.

During 2016, with the support and partnership of NGO Atina, IRC (International Rescue Committee) conducted an assessment of the protection of women and children within the refugee population in four key locations with the highest concentration of refugees in Serbia - in Preševo, Dimitrovgrad, Belgrade and Šid/Adaševci. Two members of IRC, together with six members of Atina, conducted the orientation in the field, based on the principles of assessment and tools for collecting data, in all these locations.

“Rethink your policies and decisions: They force refugee women and girls into the criminal underground economy and into smugglers’ hands. The people we see are not economic migrants. Many are simply trying to save their lives. They have no alternatives except to flee. Think about this, and act.” —Jelena Hrnjk, Atina, an NGO which provides direct support to hundreds of refugee women and girls, particularly those who’ve suffered gender-based violence and human trafficking, in Belgrade, Serbia. 

There are 2,000 child marriages in Serbia each year, It is feared that the number is even higher, because the statistics do not include persons under the age of 16, as a marriage before that age is prohibited by law, nor under-age common law marriages. Such marriages are a vicious cycle of poverty, illiteracy, family and social violence.

Whenever any of my friends returns from abroad, especially from the US, they keep talking for days and days about the bagel they ate there, fantastic bagel, the best, which, as such, does not exist anywhere else in the world. All the TV series, in which groomed lawyers are chewing a delicious, creamy bagel with coffee for breakfast, while rushing to a meeting with a client, and my pathetic attempts to make them myself... All this has come to an end, because (for a year now) I have been smothering myself in bagels in the middle of Belgrade. Salty, sweet, wholemeal.

In Belgrade, on April 21, 2016, within the UN Population Fund Regional Initiative, a Working Group for Gender Based Violence, consisting of representatives from ministries, UN agencies and civil society organizations was established.

Within the project “Improving the protection of unaccompanied minors in the region” which NGO Atina carries out together with the Permanent Mission of France to the UN and other international organisations in Vienna, a two-day training was held in April for the representatives of the Association for the Social Support of Youth - Arsis from Greece and the Association for action against violence and human trafficking - Open Gate: La Strada from Macedonia, which are in their own countries engaged in providing direct support to the refugee population.

Russian prima ballerina, Irina Kolesnikova, visited refugee camps in Tabanovce, Preševo and Krnjača and announced a new version of “Carmen” of the St. Petersburg Ballet Company, which seeks to highlight the problems of refugees in Europe. With the support of the international humanitarian organisation Oxfam, Kolesnikova wants to show how the answer to one of the biggest crises in Europe can also be provided through art, and she will, together with the choreographer of the St. Petersburg Ballet Company, set up a new “Carmen”.

Within the project “Local support for the most vulnerable refugees”, which is implemented by the Association Atina in cooperation with the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), on April 14 2016 a meeting was held in Vranje with representatives of relevant institutions and organisations from Vranje and Preševo, i.e. actors who are involved in solving the problem of refugee crisis and providing assistance and support to the most vulnerable among them - those who have experienced human trafficking and gender-based violence.  

In March 2016, Association Atina organized two two-day trainings for a total of 21 employees from Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières - MSF) engaged in providing direct assistance to the refugee population in Serbia.