Action points based on findings

• More progress needs to be made to improve the quality and sustainability of services for survivors and other persons with disabilities, including by upgrading community-based rehabilitation (CBR) centers.
• The national casualty database should be regularly updated as planned, and shared with appropriate actors and government authorities so that the data is used to improve victim assistance coordination and access to services for survivors and other persons with disabilities.
• Address persistent discrimination based on the category of disability and make adequate assistance available to civilians with disabilities on an equal basis with others.

Victim assistance commitments

Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) is responsible for significant numbers of landmine survivors, cluster munition victims, and survivors of other explosive remnants of war (ERW) who are in need. BiH has made commitments to provide victim assistance through the Mine Ban Treaty and Convention on Conventional Weapons (CCW) Protocol V, and has victim assistance obligations under the Convention on Cluster Munitions.

BiH ratified the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) on 12 March 2010.

Casualties

Casualties Overview[1]

Details and trends

In 2015, the Bosnia and Herzegovina Mine Action Center (BHMAC) reported one antipersonnel mine casualty. A civilian man was killed by a PROM-1 bounding mine while herding. Some 20 sheep were killed in the same incident.[2]

The 2015 casualty total represented a significant decrease from the 16 mine/ERW casualties BHMAC reported for 2014, including one deminer killed and another injured in one demining accident.[3]

Casualties continued to occur in 2016, with one deminer killed and three injured in March.[4]

For the period 1992–2015, BHMAC recorded a total of 8,358 mine/ERW casualties.[5] In 2015, BHMAC received 14 individual requests to check the status of records of mine casualties in its database; as a result, eight previously unrecorded casualties were entered into the database.[6] From 1996 to the end of 2015, BHMAC recorded 116 casualties among humanitarian deminers.[7]

Cluster munition casualties

No new or previous cluster munition casualties were reported in 2015. BiH reported having identified 225 cluster munition casualties according to preliminary data, out of which 44 civilians were killed and 181 were injured; while one deminer was killed and four were injured. The data is not disaggregated by age or sex.[8] At least 86 casualties during cluster munition strikes in 1995 were identified in BiH.[9] 

Victim Assistance

There were at least 6,049 mine/ERW survivors in BiH.

Victim assistance during the Cartagena Action Plan 2010–2014 and Vientiane Action Plan 2011–2015

Services provided by NGOs decreased from 2009 through the end of 2015, mainly linked with the ongoing decline in international funding.

Assessing victim assistance needs

BHAMC reported that its casualty database was regularly updated with information on registered mine/ERW incidents, clearance accidents, and assistance projects.[10]

Victim assistance coordination[11]

Since 2014, BiH has reported that until the process of reforming an independent government body appropriate for all action encompassed by assistance for cluster munition victims is completed, BHMAC will be the body temporarily documenting information about the Convention on Cluster Munitions.[12] BHMAC is not authorized to monitor government activities in regard to the implementation of relevant legislation.[13] In 2015, the process of forming a working group for victim assistance and allocating a focal point under the convention on cluster munitions was “an ongoing operation.”[14] However, BiH also reported that there was a coordination meeting of the victim assistance working group in 2015, as well as several individual meetings in order to improve victim assistance.[15] Previous coordination through the Landmine Victim Assistance (LMVA) Working Group, hosted by BHMAC, had primarily consisted of information sharing by victim assistance actors.[16]

As of 2015, the problem of BiH defining a body responsible for the coordination of victim assistance issues had persisted for over a decade.[17]

In 2010 and 2011, the government focal point for victim assistance under the Convention on Cluster Munitions in BiH was within the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.[18] In 2012 through 2014, no such victim assistance focal point within the government was reported.[19] BiH also reported that in 2014, there were “continuous coordinating activities” between BHMAC and organizations working on victim assistance in BiH for the preparation of reporting about progress for the Mine Ban Treaty Third Review Conference in Maputo.[20]

The Victim Assistance Sub-Strategy 2009–2019 was revised in 2012 as the Victim Assistance Sub-Strategy 2014–2019.[21] There is no institution or body with a mandate to monitor the implementation of the sub-strategy.

BiH did not make a statement on victim assistance at the First Review Conference of the Convention on Cluster Munitions in September 2015 or the Mine Ban Treaty Fourteenth Meeting of States Parties in December 2015. BiH provided information on victim assistance in its Mine Ban Treaty and Convention on Cluster Munitions Article 7 reporting for calendar year 2015 and in its reporting for the CCW Amended Protocol II.[22] However it did not complete the specific victim assistance form (Form E a.) on steps to implement the relevant provisions of Article 8(2) taken by States Parties to the CCW Protocol V that have ERW victims.[23]

Participation and inclusion in victim assistance

Mine/ERW survivors and their representative organizations were included in the LMVA Working Group and survivors were included in the implementation of services through NGOs.

Service accessibility and effectiveness

Victim assistance activities[24]

After more than 18 years of continuous operation, the NGO “Landmine Survivors Initiatives” closed in May 2016 citing that it was “Unable to carry on with a demanding and comprehensive approach to empowerment of mine victims and other persons with disabilities.” Since starting in 1997 as a branch office of the US-based Landmine Survivors Network (later rebranded Survivor Corps), the operation in BiH had supported more than 3,100 mine survivors and families through income-generation activities, access rehabilitation, and other services including peer support.[25]

Medical care and rehabilitation

BiH has 63 community centers for mental and physical rehabilitation. The centers continued to provide services to mine/ERW survivors.[26] Health insurance covers the costs of basic prosthetic devices, but more needed to be done to address persisting differences in coverage of other rehabilitative costs, based on the origins and category of disability.[27]

While provision of orthopedic and other devices and assistive technology is mandated by law, the extent to which these entitlements can be accessed was severely limited, because the associated regulations had not been adopted, were excessively restrictive, or were not enforced. Similarly, there were no systematic provisions for training independent mobility for persons with disabilities, which has had a particularly negative impact on persons with more severe impairment.[28]

Economic and social inclusion

Despite an overall decrease in the availability of economic inclusion activities, a number of smaller local projects were implemented in 2015, as was reported in 2014.

Arbeiter-Samariter-Bund Deutschland (ASB) continued to socioeconomic opportunities for mine/ERW survivors through a business and empowerment project funded through the European Union’s Instrument for Pre-Accession Assistance (IPA).[29] 

LSI carried out a project on best practice models for the employment of persons with disabilities and Stop Mines implemented a program of sustainable professional rehabilitation of for survivors in Republika Srpska.[30]

Laws and policies 

BiH ratified the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) in 2010, but has made little progress in implementing it.[31] NGOs also reported that in the period since BiH ratified the CRPD in 2010, “the state has yet to make concrete steps towards eliminating the discrimination against persons with disabilities.” Such discrimination still exists in both entities of the country, the Federation of BiH and Republika Srpska. Laws concerning the rights of persons with disabilities, including legislation regulating rights to healthcare and rehabilitation, labor and employment, social protection, and education, lack legal the mechanisms necessary for their implementation, which impeded their execution.[32] With regard to victim assistance, BiH reported that disability rights were relatively well regulated by legislation but was not actually implemented in practice.[33]

In 2016, the rights of many persons with disabilitieswere still not effectively protected, making this section of the population very vulnerable. The existing status-based approach to disability continued to result in significant financial inequalities among different categories and detracted from the financial sustainability of social protection.[34]

There was clear discrimination between different categories of persons with disabilities and entitlement to rights and benefits for persons with disabilities is still based on status, not on needs. The European Commission (EC) reported that as a result, persons with some categories of disabilities did not receive adequate benefits.[35] In 2015, no steps were taken to change the entitlement system to base it on needs.[36] In particular, persons with disabilities resulting from military service during the 1992–1995 conflict were given a privileged status above civilian war victims and persons who were born with disabilities or acquired impairments by other means.[37] The distinction between war veterans with disabilities, civilian victims of the war, and between those groups and other persons with disabilities was made at all levels and in all areas of BiH social protection structures.[38]

BiH has reported that “Bosnia and Herzegovina with its entities implements standard procedures related to care on persons with disabilities. In these government programs, cluster munitions victims are equal with other disabled people and they receive help that is regulated by legal acts of governmental institutions for this field. Discrimination in this matter does not exist.”[39]

Although legislation at all levels prohibits discrimination against persons with disabilities, in practice there was discrimination against persons with disabilities in all the areas of employment, education, access to healthcare, transportation, and the provision of other state services.[40]

Discrimination on the basis of disability was explicitly forbidden by the previous labor and employment laws in both entities, but new laws passed in 2015 no longer contain such provisions.[41]

In August 2016, amendments to the law on prohibition of discrimination were adopted to include disability (and age, sexual orientation, and gender identity) as grounds for discrimination.[42] In its initial reporting to the CRPD of 2012, BiH had reported that “The most important mechanism in protection from discrimination is the Law on Prohibition of Discrimination.”[43] However, the EC reported in 2015 that the anti-discrimination law still had not been amended to include disability as grounds for discrimination, “nor have its provisions been adequately reflected or transposed into labour law or higher education.”[44] The EC previously  stated that persons with disabilities “are not adequately protected,” by anti-discrimination regulations at state, entity, or cantonal levels, or in the Brčko District.[45]

There is generally poor awareness of the necessity of applying accessibility standards throughout the whole system of designing, building, and supervising construction resulting in inaccessible buildings, with only partial access to some of the facilities. There were physical obstacles to access most institutions of primary healthcare in both urban and rural environments.[46] Architectural barriers remain a major problem in exercising any rights of persons with disabilities.[47]

BiH has legislation to ensure physical access to persons with disabilities. In the Federation of BiH, the law mandated that all public buildings must be retrofitted to provide access and new buildings must also be accessible. In practice, however, buildings were rarely accessible to persons with disabilities, including several government buildings. Republika Srpska had comparable laws for public accessibility, but few older public buildings were accessible. Human rights NGOs continued to report that many new public buildings continued to be built without being made accessible for persons with disabilities.[48]

The Federation of BiH had a strategy for persons with disabilities for the period 2010–2014 and Republika Srpska had a strategy for persons with disabilities for 2010–2015.[49] The implementation of the social protection legislative framework remains weak in both the Federation and Republika Srpska.[50]