Serbia’s recognition of the Srebrenica genocide is a crucial step on the country’s path towards EU membership, the EU said on Thursday in its report on the EU candidate.

Serbian officials have repeatedly been denying that what happened in Srebrenica during Bosnia’s 1992-95 war was an act of genocide, two international courts had labelled the Bosnian Serb 1995 massacre of more than 8,000 Muslim Bosniak men and boys as such.

Serbian PM Ana Brnabic said in a recent interview with Deutsche Welle that the massacre was “a hideous crime, a war crime” but added she did not think it was a genocide.

In its 2018 Commission report on Serbia, the EU Parliament said that they “regret the reiterated denial of the Srebrenica genocide by some Serbian authorities,” and reminded that full cooperation with the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia as well as its successor, the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals, also implies fully accepting and implementing all of its rulings and decisions.

The EU “stresses that the recognition of the Srebrenica genocide is a fundamental step in Serbia’s path toward joining the European Union,” the report said.

The EP representative who proposed the amendment, Igor Soltes, told N1 that the term “fundamental step” “does not mean a precondition.

“‘Fundamental step’ means that efforts must be made in order to reach a common understanding of past events which are part of European history,” he said.

“Further, EU external action is based on and characterized by the respect for international law and, therefore, the ruling of the International Court of Justice and the ICTY must be taken into account and cannot be ignored,” he added.

Serbia’s denial of the genocide has also been burdening the country’s relations with Bosniaks since the end of the 1992-1995 war.

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