Over the past 20 years, 93,210 Bosnians have renounced their citizenship and by December 10 last year, 2,802 people did so as well, Nezavisne daily reported Monday.

The trend continued despite the pandemic over the past two years.

“In the procedure of renouncing the citizenship of BiH, the parties are not obliged to state other reasons than the fact that they already possess or that they are guaranteed the acquisition of the citizenship of another state. In informal conversations, the most common reasons are more favourable employment status, the right to own real estate, easier travel and studying abroad,” the BiH Ministry of Civil Affairs (MCP) told Nezavisne daily.

They add that a larger number of people who renounce BiH citizenship are fully integrated in the environments in which they live abroad, even more than they are in BiH.

“Some speak German much better than their mother tongue,” they said.

The Ministry added that renunciation is most often done in favour of acquiring the citizenship of Germany and Austria.
Stevo Pasalic, a demographer, pointed out that the departure of the population from BiH is much higher than the number of people who renounce their citizenship shows.

“As we can see, our citizens mostly take the citizenship of Germany and Austria, and it’s a known fact that our people mostly go there to work. But there are many more of them in those countries because in many cases our people don’t renounce our citizenship in order to take the citizenship of the country in which they work,” Pasalic noted. He added that BiH is a country from which more people leave than they come to stay and that this trend of departure will continue in the future.