European Commission to recommend Bosnia and Herzegovina start accession talks
The European Commission is expected to recommend on Tuesday (12 March) that Bosnia and Herzegovina start accession talks as a part of its path to European Union membership, according to people familiar with the matter.
The EU granted Bosnia candidate status in December 2022, after the Western Balkan country had been a potential candidate for EU membership since 2003 and formally applied for it in February 2016.
In December, EU leaders stated they would “open accession negotiations with Bosnia-Herzegovina once the necessary degree of compliance with the membership criteria is achieved”.
Back then, they invited the European Commission “to report to the Council on progress at the latest in March 2024, with a view to making a decision.”
According to several people familiar with the matter, the European Commission will now give a positive recommendation to start formal accession negotiations.
The EU executive is expected to deliver a written report on Bosnia but only give oral assessments on Ukraine and Moldova, who are also likely to be presented with negotiating frameworks by mid-March.
Bosnia will join neighbours Serbia, Montenegro, Albania, North Macedonia, Ukraine, and Moldova, which are all at various stages of their EU membership bids. Kosovo applied for EU membership in December 2022, but little progress has been made thus far.
The decision would be a major win for Bosnia and Herzegovina, a fragile country comprised of two entities, Republika Srpska and a Muslim-Croat federation, linked by a weak central government in Sarajevo.
To long-term observers, the step to grant Bosnia candidate status had come as a surprise since the country’s recent EU enlargement report noted only limited progress, particularly on electoral reforms.
Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik, who counts Russia’s President Vladimir Putin as an ally, has long threatened to secede from the rest of the country and has opposed the idea of NATO membership.
For some EU countries, including Austria, Croatia, Hungary, and Slovenia, accession progress on Ukraine and Moldova needed to go hand-in-hand with progress on the future accession of Western Balkan countries, including Bosnia.
As the step would still require unanimous approval by EU member states, the bloc’s leaders are expected to discuss the recommendation on Bosnia at their regular summit in Brussels next week.
However, some EU member states, including Germany and France, would prefer the summit not to focus on enlargement and that no further decisions be made before the EU elections in June.
A more comprehensive annual report on the status of all EU candidate countries in the Western Balkans and Europe’s East is due at the end of October this year.
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