”To put it mildly, I was speechless at the
decision of the Constitutional Court, because this is an umpteenth time
that the discrimination in the Federation of BiH has been proved, and I
can now say it is based on ethnicity,” Milić told Srna.
The Fund’s management and everyone related to this field deem the
Federation pension law discriminatory, having also in mind the
individual judgements of the European Court of Human Rights in the
previous cases for which decisions had already been issued, said Milić.
”People who earned their pensions in the territory of the
present-day Federation before April 30, 1992 don’t have this acquired
right at this point because the FBiH parliament stated that only a
returnee to the FBiH could exercise the right, which is definitely
discriminatory,” he said.
According to Milić, somebody who, because of the war, was forced to
leave Bosnia and Herzegovina and go to a third country, and the majority
of discriminated people live in Serbia, now doesn’t have the right to
continue to use their acquired right, to which all other citizens of the
world are entitled to.
”What equality and what same conditions for all citizens of BiH are
we talking about then? This is really paradoxical,” stated Milić.
The PIO Fund director says he is not considering any reciprocal measures.
”The Republic of Srpska is a constitutional category. It observes
the laws and does not discriminate against people like the Federation
does,” he said.
The Republic of Srpska has fulfilled its obligations from the Dayton
Peace Agreement but the people in the Federation didn’t manage to
restore their property, let alone exercise some other rights, he said.
The Constitutional Court rejected on Friday the request of the Serb
Caucus of the House of Peoples of the BiH Parliamentary Assembly which,
among other things, demanded that the Act on Pension and Disability
Insurance of the Federation of BiH be declared unconstitutional.
The Serb Caucus requested that the law be qualified as
unconstitutional because it did not prescribe the right to pensioners
who during the war moved from the Federation to the Republic of Srpska,
where they now live, to apply for pension with the Federation
authorities.
The RS PIO Fund has so far suffered a BAM 768 million damage because
of the discrimination by the FBiH pension fund, according to the RS
Fund’s data compiled until April.
In a lawsuit the RS PIO Fund filed with the Court of BiH in March 2011, the requested compensation amounted to BAM 545 million.
The subject of the dispute are the pensions of the beneficiaries who
earned the right by April 1992 in the territory of the present-day
Federation of BiH. At the time, there were 38,000 pensioners, of whom
22,000 are still alive.
