European Union Ministers Support Granting Candidate Status for Bosnia, Will be Approved Thursday?

Illustration of meeting European Union leaders. (Twitter/@vonderleyen)

JAKARTA - European Union ministers on Tuesday backed granting status to Bosnia and Herzegovina as a candidate to join the bloc.

The status decision must be approved by the leaders of the 27 EU members, who will gather in Brussels, Belgium for a summit meeting tomorrow Thursday.

"This sends a strong signal to the Western Balkan region and most importantly, to the people of Bosnia & Herzegovina," Austrian EU minister Karoline Edtstadler wrote on Twitter.

Meanwhile, Bisara Turkobic, Deputy Chair of the Council of Ministers and Foreign Minister of Bosnia and Herzegovina described the decision as a "huge and historic step towards EU membership."

"It is also an acknowledgment of the enormous effort that has been invested in meeting the requirements, but also in large part in the struggle to present the truth about the situation in Bosnia to EU countries and stop all efforts to harm the progress already made," he said.

"For the country, this means opening new channels of cooperation with the EU, new financial funds and investments," he said.

It is known that candidate status is largely a symbolic designation recognizing that Bosnia and Herzegovina are on the right track to begin the long and complicated process of accession. It doesn't, for example, automatically trigger the start of negotiations.

But it remains a boost for the tiny nation of 3.5 million people, which applied to join in 2016 and whose bid was approved by the European Commission in 2019.

But the Commission emphasized at the time that the country needed to make progress in 14 key priority areas, before going any further in the EU membership process.

EU leaders said after a summit with Western Balkan countries in June that they were ready to endorse candidate status, but asked the Commission to issue a judgment on implementing the 14 priorities.

The Commission report, released in October, detailed "limited progress" on reforms related to public administration and "no progress" on strengthening the judiciary and combating corruption and organized crime.

It also noted that Bosnia "needs to significantly improve alignment with the acquisition of the European Union (collection of common rights and obligations that are a legal entity and implementation of the EU)".

I am pleased that at the General Affairs Council today we agreed to grant Bosnia & Herzegovina EU candidate status. This sends a strong signal to the Western Balkan region and above all, to the citizens of Bosnia & Herzegovina.

— Karoline Edtstadler (@k_edtstadler) December 13, 2022