Every year, the European Commission assesses the preparedness of countries in 33 different areas in which the European Union (EU) has developed its legislation and standards, from the quality of statistics to environmental protection and public procurement processes.
The European Commission published its latest estimates for the six countries of the Western Balkans on October 12th, 2022, while it published the first estimates for Ukraine, Moldova, and Georgia on February 1st, 2023. The report showed that Moldova and Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) are at the same level.
Adnan Cerimagic, an analyst of the European Stability Initiative (ESI), spoke about this topic in an interview. At the beginning of the interview, he stated that BiH, of all the ten countries involved in the enlargement process, is the most unprepared for EU membership.
“I believe that there are two main reasons why this is so. The first is on the side of the EU, which, in about fifteen years in BiH, has always focused on the conditions and issues that, even when they are appreciated by the EU as largely implemented, such as the police reform in 2007 or the socio-economic reform agenda in 2015, they did not lead to progress in preparation for EU membership,” Cerimagic points out.
Another reason, he adds, is the combination of the fact that BiH, out of all ten countries, is the only one that is highly decentralized.
One of the areas in which nothing has been done in BiH since 2015 is the rule of law, and judicial reform in BiH, says Cerimagic, is most often discussed at an abstract level.
“However, you will rarely hear what it is specifically that BiH is expected to do and what it is actually about. The judiciary is made up of institutions and the people who work in them, and reforms and improvement of the work of the judiciary and the rule of law relate precisely to changes in their everyday life, which should then lead to stronger institutions and a more efficient and fair judiciary. Which then creates a climate of freedom, predictability, and security for citizens, but also for the economy and investments,” Cerimagic explains.
One of the issues that these reforms should deal with, he adds, is the improvement of the way in which it is decided who will become a judge or prosecutor in BiH.
In addition, an important question also concerns which institution and who in them carries out disciplinary processes against judges and prosecutors in BiH, and whether the “adjudicated” offenses will then affect the possibility to advance in one’s career and assume more and more responsible functions, or will they be seen as a kind of recommendation for promotion.
“Perhaps the most important question is whether we have a system within the judiciary that encourages and rewards those prosecutors and judges who deal with complicated, less certain, or more difficult to prove, cases of corruption and organized crime,” Cerimagic points out, Klix.ba reports.
E.Dz.
