The deadline for publishing results of the census of households and population in BiH is approaching. If the BiH statisticians do not agree until July 1, the project worth 50 million BAM will fail. The Prosecutor’s Office of BiH is already preventively investigating this case.
As it was stated, the Institute for Statistics of FBiH refused to remove ethnic affiliation, religious affiliation and language from 121.280 census papers for which currently there is no consent for approval of the status of resident. In other words, the federal Institute for Statistics rejected to categorize these rubrics under “unknown”, in order for these people to be included among residents.
It has been known as of earlier that representatives of the Institute for Statistics of the RS had similar proposals before, and those proposals do not comply with the international standards.
Minister of Civil Affairs of Bosnia and Herzegovina Adil Osmanović said that a unique program for processing census data must be adopted in order to respect the foreseen deadline and publish the results.
“I expect the directors of Agency for Statistics and the entity institutes to complete this process without politicization, in accordance with the International Monitoring Operation for BiH,” Osmanović stated.
When asked whether there is possibility that the Agency for Statistics will be ordered to publish the census results without consent from entity institutes if they do not agree, Osmanović said that the Council of Ministers of BiH called the Agency for Statistics of BiH to complete the process of population census.
Osmanović said that he hopes that the problem about the publishing of the census results will be completed soon. Furthermore, he highlighted that BiH cannot move forward on the path of EU integration without population census.
(Source: klix.ba)
