Una-Sana Canton

The Prime Minister of Una Sana Canton, one of ten cantons in Bosnia's Federation entity, Mustafa Ruznic, has sent an open letter to Bosnia's state security and foreign ministers, as well as to the head of the Foreigners Affairs Service, SPS, demanding an explanation for the increased number of migrants and refugees reportedly returned from Croatia to Bosnia based on a bilateral readmission agre

A minister in a Bosnian canton bordering Croatia said the EU member state had forcibly returned over 7,000 migrants and refugees to Bosnia last year, asking why his own country had not done the same to its neighbours.

Experts who spoke to BIRN BiH say the rules must urgently be harmonised and the law updated to reflect the new challenges.

"This could be disastrous because many of them [migrants] do lack personal identification documents," said Vehid Sehic, a former judge and lawyer in Bosnia.

In an abandoned building near a train station in the north Bosnian town of Banja Luka, 25-year-old Afghan Mohammed is trying to keep himself warm.

It's mid-November, and the temperature is just a few degrees above freezing. Mohammed's jacket does not look like it was made for the cold Bosnian winter.

Croatian police regularly prevent migrants from crossing the country's border, sometimes using violence, rights groups say. That has created a bottleneck in Bosnia.

Though the numbers are not on the scale of 2015, when the migrant crisis was at its height, Bosnia, and particularly its northwestern Una-Sana Canton, has struggled to cope.

The increasing number of migrants and refugees entering Bosnia and Herzegovina in 2018 has raised concerns about security, especially in towns near the border with EU member state Croatia, but official data shows that they have not committed large numbers of criminal offences.

A group of about 50 local councillors and mayors from northwestern Bosnia said they will protest on Thursday in Sarajevo in front of state institutions over what they call mistaken attempts to resolve the growing migration crisis.

The new mayor of Velika Kladusa, Fikret Abdic, who has served a prison sentence for war crimes, ran into controversy on Tuesday when he visited Sarajevo for the first time in 23 years to pick up his mandate certificate.

Police in Bosnia's Federation entity on December 17 arrested Hamdija Lipovaca, Prime Minister of the Una-Sana canton, and a top official of the Social Democratic Party. 

The case concerns allegations of corruption dating from the time when he was mayor of the northwestern city of Bihac.