Bosnien und Herzegowina

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.

Current trends and public pronouncements by some political leaders in Bosnia and Herzegovina indicate an effort to roll back reforms implemented since the end of the Balkan wars two decades ago, the UN Security Council heard on Tuesday.

The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has condemned Bosnia-Herzegovina for its failure to hold municipal elections in the ethnically divided city of Mostar for more than a decade over a legal issue. The Strasbourg court’s ruling on October 29 came in response to a suit filed by a Mostar resident and politician and gave authorities six months to amend election laws to allow a vote to take place.

The establishment of the gendarmerie comes after Republika Srpska dropped a plan in June to establish a new reservist police force – a proposal which was strongly criticised by Bosniak war victims’ groups and Bosnia and Herzegovina’s Western allies.

The database of around 27,000 verified names of people who went missing in the 1992-95 war is being published to coincide with the International Day of the Disappeared.

Another attempt by Bosnia’s tripartite presidency to break the country’s long-running political deadlock and form a new state-level government, ten months after the last election, has failed.