Bosnia new Presidency will inform the United Nations about Croatia's violation of the Succession Agreement signed by the former six Yugoslav republics, which defines the distribution of state-owned property after the breakup of former Yugoslavia.

At its first session held after the inauguration, The Bosniak, Serb and Croat members of the Presidency decided on Wednesday to ask Zagreb to respect the international treaty and return Bosnia’s pre-war property located in Croatia.

An agreement on how the property should be distributed was signed in 2001 and came into force in 2004, but since then, very few cases involving Bosnia’s state-owned property in Croatia – mostly gas stations and hotels on the Adriatic coast – have been resolved because the two countries never signed an additional bilateral contract on how exactly the agreement should be implemented.

Most of the property has since fallen into neglect, with some of the buildings turning into ruins.

In May this year, the Croatian parliament adopted a new law that enables Croatia to manage and lease out the property. Bosnian legal experts, however, fear that this could lead to Bosnia losing their claim for good.

Bosnia’s three Presidency members, Bosnian Serb Milorad Dodik, Bosniak Sefik Dzaferovic, and Bosnian Croat Zeljko Komsic, instructed Bosnia’s Foreign Ministry to notify the United Nations Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, the depository of the Agreement on Succession Issues, of Croatia’s breach of the document.

They also instructed Bosnia’s Ombudsman to look into building a case to challenge the legality of Croatia’s new law on state property at Croatia’s Constitutional Court.

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