Bosnia Signs Deal with Pakistan to Send Back Migrants
Bosnia and Herzegovina signed an agreement with Pakistan that opens up the possibility of repatriating some illegal Pakistani migrants who are currently in the Balkan country.
Pakistani Interior Minister Ijaz Ahmed Shah and Bosnian Security Minister Selmo Cikotic signed an agreement and an accompanying protocol in Islamabad on Wednesday which should allow migrants to be returned to their home country.
With the agreement, Pakistan committed itself to accept the return of its citizens who are currently living illegally in Bosnia and vice versa.
According to the agreement, the competent authorities for receiving, submitting and processing readmission requests, as well as those for transit, will be the Bosnian Security Ministry and the Ministry of Interior for Pakistan.
Readmission and reception of citizens of the two countries and the transit of foreigners will take place through the international airports in Sarajevo and Islamabad.
The issue of Pakistani migrants in Bosnia has been the source of problems between the two countries that escalated when Fahrudin Radoncic, the former Bosnian security minister, accused Islamabad in April this year of not wanting to work with Sarajevo on the illegal migration issue.
The dispute started when Radoncic ordered Bosnia’s Service for Foreigners’ Affairs, the SFA, to compile a list of an estimated 9,000 to 10,000 illegal migrants to be deported, excluding refugees from war-torn Syria.
He claimed that there are around 3,000 illegal migrants from Pakistan among them and that that Pakistani embassy didn’t want to co-operate on identifying them.
Radoncic went so far as to demand that the Pakistani ambassador to Sarajevo be declared persona non grata.
However, Radoncic did not receive the support of either state presidency chairman Sefik Dzaferovic or Bisera Turkovic, the Bosnian foreign minister, which is why he resigned in early June.
According to estimates by the International Organisation for Migration, Bosnian authorities and NGOs, there are currently about 10,000 illegal migrants in Bosnia, of whom a significant number are citizens of Pakistan.
Slobodan Ujic, director of Bosnia’s Service for Foreigner’s Affairs, SFA, told BIRN earlier that establishing the identity of migrants had been a problem for years because the embassies of countries where migrants come from do not want to cooperate.
▻https://balkaninsight.com/2020/11/04/bosnia-signs-deal-with-pakistan-to-send-back-migrants
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