Bosnia’s Council of Ministers (CoM) reached a consensus on the text of the agreement with Frontex so that police officers from the European Union could finally come to BiH and help control illegal migration, Deputy Chair of the CoM, Stasa Kosarac said Tuesday.

The agreement with Frontex is one of the key preconditions set by the European Commission so that BiH could open accession negotiations with the Union in March, and the agreement on this has so far been slowed down by internal political conflicts in BiH reduced to disputes over the powers of the state and what entities.

The incumbent BiH Security Minister Nenad Nesic claimed earlier that, due to its complex structure, BiH cannot accept a standard agreement such as Frontex concludes with other countries, so the document must be adapted to Bosnia and Herzegovina's “specificities”.

In practice, this meant that, for all its activities on the protection of the part of the border with the territory of Republika Srpska (RS) entity, which it would carry out with members of Frontex, the BiH Border Police would have to seek and obtain the consent of the entity Interior Ministry.

This is contrary to the practice according to which Frontex cooperates with states, that is, with state law enforcement agencies. Thus Bosniak ministers in the Council of Ministers blocked Nesic's proposal.

Asserting that the problem was finally solved, Kosarac said that the basis for negotiations with Frontex and the structure of the negotiation team have now been adopted.

According to the local media, Bosnia and Herzegovina proposed to Frotex a wording according to which approvals for the actions of European police officers will be given “per the powers of different levels of government.”

BiH is the only country in the region that has not yet concluded an agreement with Frontex, even though it is exposed to an increasingly strong wave of migration and it cannot effectively monitor its borders.