Bosnien und Herzegowina

Bosnia and Herzegovina is weathering the COVID-19 outbreak better than some other nations, but there’s a real danger that corruption will undermine global efforts to help it contain the pandemic, the international community’s High Representative to the Western Balkan country told the Security Council on Wednesday.

The Bosniak and Croat members of the multiethnic presidency of Bosnia-Herzegovina say they will not agree to a Serb demand to remove international judges from the country's Constitutional Court.

Since almost no decision in Bosnia can be made without the consent of all of its three constituent peoples, Bosniaks, Serbs and Croats, the Bosnian Serb strike effectively blocks much of the work of government.

Bonnie Glick, deputy administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), warns that the United States would cut its assistance to Bosnia-Herzegovina if the country fails to tackle human trafficking. … In its 2019 Trafficking in Persons Report, the U.S. State Department said the Bosnian government “does not fully meet the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking, but is making significant efforts to do so.”

Prosecutors in ex-Yugoslav countries are not doing enough to cooperate to ensure war crimes suspects are brought to trial, said Serge Brammertz, chief prosecutor at the UN court in The Hague.

Bosnia’s judicial overseer, the High Judicial and Prosecutorial Council, must be reformed, experts argued after a report for the European Commission said the country’s judiciary was in crisis and unable to cope with serious crime and corruption cases.

The transfer of less serious war crimes cases from Bosnia’s state-level prosecution to lower-level prosecutors was supposed to speed up the processing of major cases - but plans to make this happen have not been fulfilled.

Some 13 months after a general election, Bosnia-Herzegovina's tripartite presidency has broken a deadlock with the nomination of economist Zoran Tegeltija as the prime minister-designate.

The parliament of Bosnia's ethnic Serb entity, Republika Srpska, has approved nonbinding resolutions rejecting the so-called "Bonn Powers" of the international community's top civilian official in Bosnia-Herzegovina and calling for a referendum on Bosnia's NATO accession.