Nearly 90,000 citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina have renounced their citizenship to date, and authorities are concerned because the number of applications is increasing year by year, the Sarajevo-based Dnevni Avaz daily said on Wednesday.

According to figures from the Ministry of Civilian Affairs, 88,163 people have renounced Bosnian citizenship since the war of the early 1990s, and 3,735 did so between January 1 and December 3 this year. In 1996, the first post-war year, only six persons relinquished Bosnian citizenship.

Most of the people who renounced Bosnian citizenship have become citizens of Germany, Austria, Slovenia, Norway and the Czech Republic. In some countries, such as Denmark, Bosnians who opted for Danish citizenship were allowed to keep their Bosnian citizenship, and with some Western countries, such as Sweden, Bosnia and Herzegovina has an agreement on dual citizenship.

A fee of about €400 is paid for renunciation of Bosnian citizenship, except in cases where applicants seek citizenship of one of the countries of the former Yugoslavia, when the fee is about €100. Last year, Bosnia and Herzegovina earned about €1.8 million in revenues from citizenship renunciation fees.