The Board of the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), a coalition of companies, governments, investors and civil society organisations has unanimously downgraded Azerbaijan to a "candidate country". Azerbaijan will be suspended from the EITI in April 2016 if it does not comply with a set of requirements that ensure civil society can work freely in the country.

On Wednesday 22 July the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) will decide whether it will arrange a loan of up to $ 500 million to Russia’s Lukoil for the Shah Deniz II offshore gas project in Azerbaijan.

Together with the campaigners of Sport for Rights and sixteen other NGOs, Bankwatch has written a letter to the EBRD’s president and its directors. We urge them to reject the project because Azerbaijan fails the EBRD’s basic requirements which include human rights, multi-party democracy, rule of law and pluralism.

In this letter to EIB, civil society organisations point out that the EIB's forthcoming climate policy cannot only be limited to repackaging previous climate commitments or solely focusing on technical incremental changes. In the framework of the new EU 2030 climate and energy targets and the forthcoming international climate conference in Paris, ambitious new policy commitments are indispensable to make the EIB credible.

This paper addresses the challenges faced by civil sociey organisations in building and maintaining their capacities for fully contributing to monitoring and the
implementation of ESIF 2014 - 2020.

As exemplified by best practices from Poland and Slovakia, Techncial Assistance can indeed support civil society partners' comprehensive involvement in the policy cycle. However, financial support for partners is more an exemption than a common practice in the CEE region.