Bosnia’s Security Minister said that his party, the Serb Democratic Party (SDS), is not happy about the US sanctions against a lawmaker from the opposing Alliance of Independent Social Democrats (SNSD), Nikola Spiric, adding that this is a devastating blow to Bosnia’s Prosecution.
“The people from the SDS know what that means, even though many were eager for some kind of sanctions months in advance and have contributed to this situation,” Dragan Mektic said.
The US State Department said on Monday that it has banned Bosnian Serb lawmaker NikolaSpiric and members of his immediate family from entering the US overSpiric's alleged “involvement in significant corruption.”
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Spiric was sanctioned under Section 7031(c) of the Department of State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs Act of 2018, which says that, should the US Secretary of State have credible information that foreign officials were involved in “significant corruption or gross violations of human rights, those individuals and their immediate family members are ineligible for entry into the United States.”
The Minister added that the SDS and he personally are worried about the sanctions against Spiric because they “harm the reputation of the (Serb-dominated, semi-autonomous) Republika Srpska (RS) entity in international relations.”
Mektic pointed out that “many will ask who are these people, what kind of politics are they into, what must they be doing to provoke US sanctions,” and asked, “what serious businessman would want to invest in the RS?”
According to him, these sanctions are also “devastating for Bosnia’s state Prosecution,” in terms of its fight against corruption and organised crime.
