Bosnia & Herzegovina

In the third episode of Henrik Enderlein Fellow Besa Shahini’s podcast miniseries exploring the EU accession process in the Western Balkans and the lessons for EU enlargement policy, she talks to Adnan (Adi) Ćerimagić, Senior Analyst for the Western Balkans at ESI, about Bosnia and Herzegovina’s long-drawn path to EU accession and its problematic constitutional setup.

Bosnia and Herzegovina’s EU accession seemed out of reach for over three decades. The EU imposed an electoral and constitutional reform as the precondition for opening accession talks, only to give them the green light earlier this year despite the reform not having been implemented yet. In this episode, Besa Shahini asks, if accession talks could ultimately begin without the reform, why was this not done years ago? To answer this question, she is joined by Adnan (Adi) Ćerimagić, Senior Analyst for the Western Balkans at ESI, who previously worked for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Bosnia and Herzegovina in Sarajevo and Brussels. Together, they discuss the problematic constitutional setup which discriminates against parts of the population from running in elections and the difficulties to undergo any meaningful reforms in Bosnia and Herzegovina without a credible EU accession process.

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