The issue of denationalization of state property and restitution is important on Bosnia and Herzegovina’s (BiH) path to membership in the European Union (EU), and of all other post-socialist countries, only our country and Albania have not resolved it yet.
When we talk about the value of restitution, no one knows the exact amount. Nationalization began in 1945 and ended in 1964, although even after that certain objects were nationalized in a special way. Muharem Cero, an expert on state property, explains what the future holds for denationalization and restitution in BiH, as well as what has been done so far.
”The story of denationalization and restitution is most directly related to state property. Stopping the process of denationalization was an attempt that is still ongoing, the ethnicization of the territory and the search for a solution that would transfer the inter-entity line and the inter-cantonal demarcation line to the so-called land registry borders. Little is known that in the set of privatization laws from 1997, as part of the certification privatization, a law was proposed that would solve the restitution with a certification model of paying recessionary creditors, and luckily there was enough resistance for that law to be thrown out and not accepted. The first attempt at denationalization was in 2000, but the Government of Republika Srpska (RS) tried to solve the issue by passing the entity law. In 2002, the then High Representative stopped the process and clearly instructed that the issue of denationalization must be resolved by passing a law at the state level,” Cero explains.
The next attempt to resolve the issue of denationalization took place in 2007 after the ratification of the Succession Agreement, and then the Ministry of Justice of BiH offered one of the possible models, but the same problem arose in the process of accepting the proposal because the RS insisted on entity privatizations.
The issue of denationalization of state property is one of the conditions for BiH’s entry into the EU.
”In the accession process, the issue of denationalization itself, which is directly related to Chapter 23, the rule of law, has not yet been resolved in Albania and BiH out of all the post-socialist countries. The Convention on Human Rights itself says that property cannot be taken by force. Nationalization, agrarian reform, and everything else that happened as state property was created is an act of legal violence in another ideological concept that was established in countries that were not considered the ”Western Bloc”, which included Yugoslavia. Nationalization ignored this human right and confiscated property from citizens and religious communities through legal violence. Special attention should be paid to laws from that period, after January 1st, 1945, which confiscated property from German citizens. If you follow the processes of denationalization in Serbia, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia, and Hungary, you will see that all of them on the way to the EU have respected conventions that are superior to the constitutions,” Cero emphasized.
Laws on denationalization and restitution have their legal foundation in international law in the Convention on Human Rights.
”The largest part of the property can be replaced by replacement property, especially in the case of agricultural and forest land, and even in real estate where it refers to seized buildings, business premises, and other real estates. We have already entered that form. The Canton Sarajevo (CS) allowed the holders of tenancy rights to be given apartments that have been nationalized, and the owners to be given replacement property,”he added.
The same issue of replacement assets also applied to public companies.
”There were three income statements: financial assets, liabilities, neutral (aktiva, pasiva, neutralni). Unfortunately, many companies did not recognize the neutral income statement, which by definition is an asset for restitution. They neglected that this property cannot be the subject of privatization, and I think that this is where the biggest failures occurred, and precisely these damages are one of the biggest obstacles in the denationalization process,” Cero thinks, Klix.ba reports.
E.Dz.
