Bosnia and Herzegovina

On the eve of the 30th anniversary of the genocide in Srebrenica, the Western Balkans Strategy Group, working under the auspices of the Heinrich Böll Stiftung, calls on all governments of the Western Balkans to ensure appropriate commemoration of the victims of the genocide and to fully implement the United Nations General Assembly Resolution adopted on 23 May 2024.

This report is a follow up to Heinrich Boll Stiftung’s 2019 report People on the Move in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 2018: Stuck in the corridors to the EU. In the first report, we covered the situation in BiH during 2018, and how it carried on in 2019. Since we wrote the report nothing much, but at the same time a lot has changed and happened with relation to the people on the move who have continued to come to the country to this day. Unlike previous years, the majority of people arriving are from Afghanistan.

The Dayton Agreement is centred around a warped, ethnicised view that accords a special role in the state to the three constitutional peoples – the Bosniaks, the Croats and the Serbs. The overall population, the citizens, the citoyens were effectively stripped of their powers; the individual person degraded – existing merely as an instrument of ethnic power cartels.

Our world is facing one of its greatest challenges: the race to zero (emissions) and climate-neutrality. Science tells us almost everything we need to know about the rules of this race. Moreover, most countries have read these and signed-up to enter the race years ago, in Paris, in 2015. The Paris Agreement, a legally binding international treaty on climate change, was adopted by 196 countries at COP 21 in Paris, on 12 December 2015 and entered into force on 4 November 2016. Its main goal is to limit global warming to well below 2, preferably to 1.5 degrees Celsius, compared to pre-industrial levels. To achieve this long-term temperature goal, countries aim to reach global peaking of greenhouse gas emissions as soon as possible to achieve a climate neutral world by mid-century.