Sarajevo

A decision by the Sarajevo Cantonal Assembly to name one of the streets in the Novi Grad municipality after a Hague Tribunal defendant, deceased Bosnian Army general Mehmed Alagic has been criticised by survivors of the 1992-95 war, international organisations and rights activists.

Millions of euros generated from corruption, tax evasion and organized crime are moving through Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro and Serbia every year, a new report by the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, GI-TOC, published on Wednesday, says.

Struggling with surging COVID-19 infections, several Balkan countries said on Wednesday that they would step up restrictions in hopes of easing the pressure on their overburdened health systems.

A Sarajevo municipality has temporarily stopped issuing birth certificates due to a computer virus that locks documents in its database for the second time in some two weeks.  

Bosnia and Herzegovina is not alone in using age as a determinant for developing guidance to particular populations, but has taken it to extremes by creating a punishable offence that only certain age groups can be charged with.

Police in southwest Bosnia have stopped five buses containing migrants and refugees from Sarajevo from going to the Salakovac asylum centre near the city of Mostar.

They intercepted the buses when they arrived in Konjic, between Sarajevo and Mostar. Cantonal police then told them they cannot go any further, N1 media reported.

Supporters of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan have started arriving in the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo, where tens of thousands of people are expected to attend a rally in support of Erdogan and his party ahead of the Turkish elections on May 20.

Ahead of the announcement of the results in Bosnia's municipal elections on Sunday, the two main parties representing Bosniaks and Serbs claimed big victories.

A growing number of children attending primary and secondary school in Sarajevo are learning Turkish and Arabic as "second foreign languages" alongside those traditionally taught to Bosnian children, such as English and German, the Ministry of Culture and Education of the Canton of Sarajevo told BIRN.

The LGBT community in Sarajevo has called on the Bosnian authorities to punish the perpetrators of an attack last Friday on the Kino Kriterion, one of the few LGBT-friendly clubs in the capital.

"Authorities need to prosecute this homophobic attack as a proper hate crime," Emina Bosnjak, from the Sarajevo Open Center, which promotes LGBT rights in Bosnia, told BIRN on Monday.