Category: North Macedonia

Coalition Margins are preparing a strategic legal response to the growing use of anonymous Facebook pages to orchestrate gender-based violence, hate speech, and coordinated attacks on civic activists in North Macedonia. These actions exploit the lack of platform transparency and the inability of state authorities to ensure timely, adequate protection of human rights in digitally networked spaces.

The litigation they intend to prepare through this research will focus on protecting the dignity, integrity, and rights of HRDs in North Macedonia who have faced sustained online attacks by anonymous Facebook pages operated by anti-gender actors. These attacks abuse the right to privacy to inflict harm, compromise the work of activists through hate speech and incitement to violence, and are met with inadequate institutional response—creating a climate of impunity.

Through the research Coalition Margins will identify the most effective legal avenue to obtain administrator and user data from Meta, enabling Coalition Margins to unmask perpetrators and prepare strong case files. The legal analysis will also serve as a resource for human rights defenders across the Western Balkans to replicate similar legal action in their contexts.