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The European Commission is expected to recommend on Tuesday (March 12) that Bosnia and Herzegovina begin accession negotiations as part of its path to joining the European Union, sources said.
Bosnia, a country in the Western Balkans, has been a potential candidate for EU membership since 2003, and the EU will grant candidate status to Bosnia in December 2022, having formally applied in February 2016. gave.
In December, EU leaders said they would “start accession negotiations with Bosnia and Herzegovina once the necessary degree of compliance with the accession criteria has been achieved.”
At the time, they asked the European Commission to “report to the Council on its progress no later than March 2024, with a view to taking a decision.”
Sources said the European Commission plans to make a positive recommendation to start formal accession negotiations.
The EU executive is expected to give a written report on Bosnia, but only verbal assessments on Ukraine and Moldova, with both countries likely to present negotiating frameworks by mid-March.
Bosnia will join neighbors Serbia, Montenegro, Albania, North Macedonia, Ukraine and Moldova, which are at various stages of EU membership. Kosovo applied for EU membership in December 2022, but little progress has been made so far.
This decision will be a major victory for Bosnia and Herzegovina. Bosnia and Herzegovina is a fragile state consisting of two entities, the Republika Srpska and the Islamic Croat Federation, linked to a weak central government in Sarajevo.
For long-term observers, the move to grant Bosnia candidate status came as a surprise, since Bosnia’s recent EU enlargement report noted limited progress, particularly on electoral reform.
Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik, who counts Russian President Vladimir Putin as an ally, has long threatened to leave the country with the rest of the country and opposed the idea of joining NATO.
For some EU countries, including Austria, Croatia, Hungary and Slovenia, progress on the accession of Ukraine and Moldova needed to proceed in parallel with progress on the future accession of the Western Balkan states, including Bosnia.
The measure still requires the unanimous approval of EU member states, whose leaders are expected to discuss the recommendations on Bosnia at their regular summit in Brussels next week.
But some EU member states, including Germany and France, hope the summit will not focus on enlargement and that no further decisions will be taken before EU elections in June.
A more comprehensive annual report on the situation in all EU candidate states in the Western Balkans and eastern Europe is due to be submitted at the end of October this year.
[Edited by Alice Taylor]
Read more at Euractiv
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