Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) took the first step in implementing the readmission agreement with Pakistan.
A little more than 1.700 migrants currently live in BiH, of which around 250 are Pakistanis.
Among them is 26-year-old Musa. He came to BiH two years ago. For the interview, he says that he has already tried 11 times to cross the border between BiH and Croatia, in the west of BiH.
A long process
BiH is the only country in the Western Balkans that has a readmission agreement with Pakistan. In 2015, Islamabad suspended the readmission agreement with the European Union (EU), signed five years earlier.
Currently, BiH has no budget for deportation, and the procedure can take months.
What is the deportation procedure?
”The person does not have any documents. He tells us that his name is Muhammad Ali and that he comes from Afghanistan, Pakistan, or whatever country he claims to be from. That’s how we introduce him into our system. We take his biometric data (fingerprint) and photo. In the last four or five years, we have registered more than 95.000 migrants,” said Sasa Kecman from the BiH Ministry of Security.
The goal of the BiH authorities is to speed up this process. Recently, representatives of the National Database and Registration Authority (NADRA), a Pakistani agency that manages databases and issues personal documents, as well as the Agency for Identification Documents, Records, and Data Exchange of BiH, visited BiH.
”NADRA can enable us to digitize and improve this agreement so that we can identify people faster and thus obtain travel documents for them so that we can send them back to Pakistan under the readmission agreement,” Kecman adds.
Lack of funds
One of the problems is that the funds for deportation must be provided by the Service for Affairs with Foreigners, one of the seven agencies operating within the Ministry of Security of BiH.
On June 30th, after months of delay, BiH received the budget for 2022, RSE writes.
E.Dz.
