EU regrets delay in adopting Bosnia's census legislation

(SARAJEVO) - EU envoys to Bosnia on Friday expressed "deep regret" over a parliamentary session boycott by the main Serb party which has delayed adoption of a law on the country's first postwar census.

European Union ambassadors to Bosnia "deeply regret the deliberate boycott" by the Union of Independent Social Democrats (SNSD) deputies of the parliament's upper house session on Thursday which led to the census law not being voted on because of the lack of a quorum, a statement said.

"The delay in the adoption of this law risks further isolating Bosnia-Hercegovina," it added.

The ambassadors warned of the danger that in Bosnia, unlike in all other European countries, the 2011 census will not be held.

"The lack of reliable statistical data ... would also significantly impede" Bosnia-Hercegovina in its European integration process, they said, calling on Bosnian lawmakers to review the issue when they meet again in September.

The parliament's lower house in June backed the census legislation, which is a matter of dispute between the country's Croats, Muslims and Serbs.

But on Thursday the SNSD deputies boycotted the upper house session during which it had been scheduled for a vote.

The SNSD objects to a provision according to which the census results will not be used in power-sharing before the process of the return of refugees from the 1992-1995 war is completed. Muslims claim that otherwise the census findings would cement the results of wartime "ethnic cleansing".

Bosnia's inter-ethnic war in the early 1990s claimed some 100,000 lives and displaced 2.2 million people. It forced most of them to move to the regions within the country controlled by their ethnic group.

The conflict left Bosnia split into two semi-independent entities -- the Serbs' Republika Srpska and the Muslim-Croat Federation -- each having its own government.

The last census in 1991 found that Bosnia -- then a part of Yugoslavia -- had 4.4 million inhabitants, with 43.7 percent of them Muslims, 31.4 percent Serbs and 17.3 percent Croats. The three ethnic communities lived throughout Bosnia's territory.