Journalists called to join fight against blackmail

Vienna [ENA] The Vienna-based Resilience Fund will select ten journalists and others to build a platform against organized crime. Under the yearlong fellowship participants will receive US$15 000 each in line with the principles of professionalism, integrity and transparency. The Fund said applications would be accepted from individuals working in communities affected by organized crime. Entries must be submitted by 04 January.

For 2021 the theme of the Resilience Fellowship will be extortion and organized crime. Fellows will be asked to combine their various perspectives in the development of collaborative outputs, as well as to represent the Fund as Resilience Fund Ambassadors who will raise awareness of the theme, issues and the importance of civil society in countering organized crime. The Fund will give preference to those applicants with the incentives and means to collaborate on sustainable projects. The Fellowship will start on 30 January 2021 and end on 31 December 2021. Due to the risks of COVID-19, all activities planned will be held virtually; depending on how the pandemic evolves, the Fellowship will assess the possibility to support in-person events.

Eligible candidates could represent the media, activists and advocacy, the arts, community leaders, the academic and the public sector (policymakers), the call for submissions said. There are no gender, ethnicity, age, or religion limitations but applying individuals should be from countries disproportionately affected by organized crime and/or from least developed countries (LDCs). The overall make-up of the winners would be diverse and reflect an equitable geographic and gender balance. The Resilience Fund is managed by the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC) and funded by Norway and Germany. One of the selection criteria is fluency in at least one of these languages: Spanish, English and French.

Candidates also must answer questions on how organized crime has affected their community with an emphasis on the 2021 program theme “Extortion as an illicit economy of organized crime”; what resilience meant to them and what they had done to encourage resilience in home communities. According to organizers blackmail is frequently used as a strategy to spread terror within society. It is a motor of migration and displacement in many communities. For organized-crime groups, it is a tool of control and fear. “The damage caused by extortion is huge and widespread. It harms the economy of nations, the legitimacy of government and the social fabric of families and communities”, the Fund said.

The Fellowship would allow participants to share perspectives and build a global community for change, while supporting initiatives to counter extortion at the local level. “This kind of cross-cultural exchange, alongside capacity building, is what the Resilience Fund Fellowship is all about”, Fund Director Siria Gastelum Felix said. GI-TOC is an independent civil-society organization, headquartered in Geneva, with a globally dispersed Secretariat and a high-level advisory board. GI-TOC’s work spans across a wide variety of areas encompassing criminal markets like drugs, people, arms, environmental commodities, violence and their impacts.