While Konaković Sees Spies Everywhere, Ademović Recalls an Important Story: EUROPOL Taken from the State and Given to Entities!

By: Amina Čorbo-Zećo

While Elmedin Konaković, BiH Minister of Foreign Affairs and President of NIP, has been playing the 'Balkan spy' for days and publicly talking about alleged BIA elements and Russian camps, important issues remain unresolved.

Important stories are being suppressed with conspiracy theories and the fantasies of political representatives about connecting political rivals and dissidents with foreign spy services, all while state institutions are being devalued and their competencies taken away.

One such unfinished story is the EUROPOL contact point, which is effectively a quasi-body, neither an administrative body nor an administration. One could say that the national common contact point of Bosnia and Herzegovina for cooperation with EUROPOL is not functioning. More precisely, it is in chaos!

This is precisely what the Vice-President of NIP, Kemal Ademović, will warn about during his recent guest appearance on FTV.

"Authorities from Republika Srpska strive to ensure that no new competencies are transferred from the entity to the state level. They are very careful about that. We strive to ensure that no competencies are transferred from the state level to the entity. This has happened in the past, one of those examples is EUROPOL, where it was lowered from the state level to the entities," said Ademović.

Not many media outlets, nor the parties gathered in the Trojka coalition, have focused on this story, but it is precisely this admission by Ademović about the transfer of competencies that has opened old wounds. Especially when today, a little further from the cameras, the Republika Srpska entity is trying to gain a position in the contact point (SPOC) for international information exchange.

Ademović's translated statement actually means that everything functioned much better before the establishment of full cooperation with the European Union Agency for Law Enforcement Cooperation (Europol)!

This was completely expected, because during the establishment of the contact point, the Constitution and laws of BiH were derogated, and concessions were made to the demands of Republika Srpska representatives, so the Ministry of Security of BiH was chosen as the seat of the contact point, and not the Directorate for the Coordination of Police Bodies, even though according to EU guidelines, all channels for international information exchange (INTERPOL, EUROPOL, SELEC, police liaison officer) must be located in one place.

It is completely clear that one of the goals of moving the contact point from the Directorate for the Coordination of Police Bodies and the incomplete regulation of its work was to create confusion and facilitate unauthorized access to information by certain political options in BiH.

The regulations currently governing the work of the contact point and cooperation with EUROPOL are vague and contradictory, and are interpreted and applied differently. According to well-informed sources of Patria, the main word is still spoken by the Minister of Security of BiH, Nenad Nešić, although he has no operational competencies and should not interfere with the work of the Contact Point.

However, the responsible parties are not too concerned with these real problems, as they do not have time due to idleness and futile public appearances in which they make unbelievable claims, and we don't know which one is crazier than the other.

At the same time, proponents of the division of BiH, which certainly begins with the abolition of competencies and its institutions, are not wasting time.

Because, the formation of this Contact Point was the formation of something that already exists within the Directorate and is regulated by law. But the competencies of the DKPT were simply wanted to be taken away and a national contact point established for political reasons, not professional standards! And this is one of the main problems, although those who should be talking about it are not. And my sources from Brussels say exactly that - that they are also aware there that they made a mistake in this story!