The Chairman of the Presidency of BiH Dragan Covic will submit the answers to the Questionnaire of the European Commission to the President of the European Commission Jean Claude Juncker on February 28.
The President of the EC will pay an official visit to Sarajevo on February 28, and he will return to the Brussels with the answers of BiH to the Questionnaire of the EC. The Questionnaire includes a total of 3,242 questions, which are grouped into the political and economic criteria and 33 chapters of the legal acquis of the EU.
The Questionnaire of the EC for preparation of the opinion on the membership application represents an analytical tool of the EU enlargement policy, which the EC is using to evaluate the readiness of a certain country that applied for membership to get the candidate status and open negotiations on accession with the EU. Ultimately, the EU Council and the European Council make a decision on this.
Johannes Hahn, the European Commissioner for Neighbourhood Policy and Enlargement Negotiations, handed over the Questionnaire of the EC to the Chairman of the Council of Ministers of BiH on December 9, 2016. Therefore, the European Commission officially started the process of preparing an opinion on the Request for membership in the European Union of BiH that was submitted to the Council of the European Union back in February 2016.
BiH needed more time to answer the questions in comparison to neighbouring countries, due to its specific constitutional arrangement. Answers to the Questionnaires of the EC in Serbia, Croatia and Montenegro were done by only one level of government (state institutions), while the state, entity and cantonal levels of government, as well as the Brcko District of BiH (i.e. 13 levels) participated in BiH.
Recently, the opposition parties strongly opposed the fact that the results of the censuses that are recognized at the national and international level, but not by the entity of RS, will be sent to official Brussels.
It was later explained to the public that the European Commission in the Questionnaire requests an overview of the realistic situation, and that the real situation in case of BiH is that the RS does not recognize internationally recognized results of the census, i.e. it has its own results.
(Source: Er. M./Klix.ba)
