The European Commission issued its annual progress reports for the Balkan states this week, as part of its “enlargement package,” a set of documents related to the countries’ progress toward EU membership. The reports include assessments of each country’s progress on war crimes prosecution. In the cases of BiH, Serbia, and Kosovo, the Commission states that progress on war crimes prosecution is still insufficient.
Serbia is criticised for not cooperating properly with the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and extraditing three wanted members of the nationalist Serbian Radical Party to The Hague.
In Kosovo, it warns that local war crimes prosecutors and police could be under-resourced and under-skilled.
It also expresses continued concerns about the huge backlog of unprocessed war crimes cases in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Overall, the unresolved fate of close to 11,000 people who disappeared during the conflicts of the 1990s remains a humanitarian concern, the reports say.
