EU expects Serbia to hand over Yugoslav-era archives to Slovenia

European Enlargement Commissioner Marta Kos has said Serbia would be expected to hand over the archives of Yugoslav-era security services to Slovenia as Prime Minister Janez Janša doubled down on his demand for Serbia to do so as a condition for Slovenia to allow its progress in accession talks with the European Union.

"We of course expect that Serbia will hand over these archives," Kos, who comes from Slovenia, told Slovenian media as she presented the annual set of documents evaluating candidate countries' progress towards EU membership.

Kos said that open bilateral issues between EU members and candidate countries must be resolved in a European spirit, adding that the enlargement package underscored the importance of honouring past agreements, including the Yugoslavia succession treaty, for good neighbourly relations, CE Report quotes The Slovenia Times.

She said the package made a specific reference to the 2001 Yugoslavia succession agreement, signed by six successor countries, including Serbia and Slovenia.

But Kos said she expected Slovenia to support Serbia's EU accession talks and to address any potential open issues bilaterally. She also expressed the belief that challenges could be resolved without ultimatums.

This was her response to Janša making Serbia's EU accession progress conditional on its handing over all files from archives of former Yugoslav services that are related to Slovenia.

Slovenia to insist archives handover

Janša, whose Democratic Party (SDS) accuses Kos of collaborating with the former secret police, first set the condition in response to the student-led movement winning Serbia's election. He later explained the demand was nothing new, being a matter of the Yugoslavia succession agreement.

"Serbia is just one of the successor states of the former Yugoslavia and is obligated to return to the states that emerged from the former republics all property, including archival materials, pertaining to those states, and this is nothing new," he said in reiterating his position again on 4 November.

Belgrade claims the files of the secret services have been destroyed. The Archives of Slovenia received an official response from Serbia several years ago that the archival collections of the federal interior secretariat, part of which was the former state security service known as UDBA, were destroyed or severely damaged during the 1999 NATO bombing of the Interior Ministry building.

Slovenia's Foreign Ministry has pointed out that Slovenia will insist on the files concerned to be handed over as stipulated in Annex D of the 2001 Agreement on Succession Issues of the former Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, which provides for immediate and unhindered access to the archives of the former common state.

Slovenia made an initiative in 2014 for the joint archival material of the successor states that will not be subject to division to be digitised. The ministry says the initiative has since been accepted by all the countries involved and talks are currently under way on how to implement it.

However, the ministry points out that digitization offers a solution only for the accessibility of materials that are not subject to division or return, either due to their collective nature or the principle of the indivisibility of archival materials. "Slovenia will consistently insist that the materials to which it is entitled under the agreement be handed over in their original form," the ministry explained to the Slovenian Press Agency on the same day that Kos commented on the issue.

Photo AI