The follow-up questions the European Commission needs Bosnia to answer in order to consider the country’s membership application concern technical issues about how the country’s Government works and Bosnia will not have a hard time answering them, the Director of Bosnia’s Directorate for European Integration, Edin Dilberovic, said.

Dilberovic explained what kind of questions the EC follow-up Questionnaire contains.

“How do you form a parliamentary majority? How are the members of Bosnia’s Presidency elected? – are some of the questions. The answers will be rewritten from the Constitution and Bosnia’s legal code,” he explained.

Bosnia had formally applied for EU membership candidate status in February 2016 and was, as part of the process, to provide answers to 3,242 questions in a European Commission Questionnaire within six months. It took the country much longer to respond because deep political and ethnic divisions complicated the answers.

In February this year, Bosnia's senior officials handed over the answers to the Questionnaire to EC President Jean-Paul Juncker, after which the country expected the Commission's opinion to its EU membership application.

But the EC sent back a list of 655 follow-up questions, for the sake of clarifying and providing missing information regarding some of Bosnia’s answers in the original questionnaire.

However, the answers to the original 3,242 questions and to the additional 655 will not be the only thing taken into account when Bosnia’s potential EU candidate status will be discussed, Dilberovic said.

“The questions are not the only source on which the European Commission will base its opinion regarding Bosnia. There are other sources – NGO’s, citizens, the Delegation of the EU in Bosnia, EU member countries that have embassies in Sarajevo and field missions in Bosnia,” he said.

“In the ideal case scenario, we could get a candidate status and a date for when negotiations will begin. When taking into account experiences of other countries in the region, all of them got some specific conditions,” Dilberovic said.