The prospect of completing the state property objective before the November meeting of the Steering Board of the Peace Implementation Council should not be missed.
However, it is clear now that the Council of Ministers mandated Inventory Working Group will be unable to complete the property inventory by the 30 September 2009 deadline.
Because of this the High Representative wrote to BiH and Entity Prime Ministers calling for immediate progress on the collation of data on immovable property in line with that identified by the Council of Ministers in it’s decision of 9 April 2009.
This decision tasks the Inventory Working Group to collect documentation from Land Registry Offices and Cadastre from across BiH on property that was registered as owned or managed either by SFRY bodies on the territory of BiH, or by the SRBiH on 31 December 1991.
This information is freely available to any member of the public.
The Steering Board of the PIC has already instructed the High Representative to undertake all appropriate measures to ensure that the five objectives are delivered in full.
Given the uninformed statements made yesterday on this issue the OHR underlines that;
(1) The inventory is a technical process of collection information from Land Registry Offices and Cadastre and that is already publicly available.
(2) Any person can request and get this information. This is public property held for the benefit of all citizens.
(3) The scope of this inventory is not an issue for either the OHR or the International Community. This was determined by decision of the Council of Ministers of 9 April 2009 when the Inventory Working Group was established.
(4) Decisions of the High Representative were put in place to stop widespread disposal of publicly owned property before a system was put into place; this is separate to the mandate for the Inventory Working Group set out by the Council of Ministers.
(5) In collecting this information the OHR is in no way determining the outcome of the political agreement that will have to be made on the division of this property.
Those opposing such a transparent process of information gathering, which would determine what happened to this property since 1991, should explain why they do not want the owners, every single citizen of BiH, to have this information.