EU trio visit Sarajevo to encourage Bosnia on EU path

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, Croatian Prime Minister Andrej Plenković and Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte, who recently has expressed reservations about Bosnia’s EU accession, will meet the country’s top officials in Sarajevo on Tuesday.

According to Croatian and Bosnian media, Rutte, whose country was hesitant about opening negotiations with Bosnia in December, arrived in Sarajevo on Monday afternoon. Von der Leyen and Plenković will join him by the end of the day.

The three EU leaders are expected to meet with the chairwoman of the Council of Ministers, Borjana Krišto, and with members of the Presidency, collective head of state, and the Parliamentary Assembly of Bosnia.

The goal of this visit is to encourage progress in Bosnia’s accession to the EU, the European Commission said in a statement.

Bosnia and Herzegovina received the status of a candidate for EU membership in 2022. And while only Ukraine and Moldova received the green light to open accession negotiations in December, Bosnia was told to wait until March of this year to open talks, provided it meets the criteria set by the EU.

Most of the laws that the EU requires BiH to adopt have long been in a high degree of compliance, but their adoption is stuck on trivial issues, such as whether the appellate division of the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina will be located in East Sarajevo, as the Bosniak parties advocate, or in Banja Luka, as requested by SNSD, the party of Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik.

However, due to the complex decision-making structure in the country, in which representatives of both entities – the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Republika Srpska, as well as all three constituent peoples – Bosniaks, Croats, and Serbs, have the right to veto, the question is whether and when the agreed changes will be adopted. All the more so because in Bosnia and Herzegovina, it is not a rare case that in political trade, one regulation is conditioned by the adoption of another.

“The goal of the visit is for the EU to convince itself that Bosnia has made significant progress on its way to EU membership and that it can open negotiations,” Croatian MEP Željana Zovko (which party?) told Euractiv.

“The fact is that an agreement has been reached on the main issues, as well as that the current Council of Ministers has made incomparably greater progress in harmonising with the Union, but its predecessors”, she said.

The EU has realised that BiH needs to be given an impulse on its way to full membership in the Union, but also that Bosnia’s membership in the EU is a geopolitical issue, Zovko said, adding she believes that it is likely that BiH will open accession negotiations in March.

Namely, leaving BiH in some kind of ‘undefined black hole’ in the Western Balkans would be a move that could cause the most damage to the Union itself due to the numerous interests and influences that are refracted through BiH – from the relatively strong influence of Russia, through the interests of Turkey, but also several countries in the Middle East, such as Saudi Arabia and Iran, and even China.

The leaders of the ruling parties in Bosnia and Herzegovina met last week in the vicinity of Banja Luka and agreed, as reported by local Bosnian media, on changes to the largest part of the regulations that the EU is demanding from Sarajevo.

(Adriano Milovan | Euractiv.hr)