March 28, 2020

ECHR tells Bosnia to remove illegally-built church

topic:	Rule of Law
located:	Bosnia and Herzegovina
editor:	Katarina Panić

A Muslim woman Fata Orlović from Bosnia and Herzegovina was forced to leave her home in the eastern village of Konjević Polje during the war in the nineties. Her family was ethnically cleansed while her husband, Šaćir was killed. In 1995, the Dayton Peace Accord ended the war and guaranteed a free return of refugees as well as the property repossession. Fata got her property back except for one single plot. She decided to fight for her backyard, and she had a particular reason.

Namely, in 1998, two years before Fata Orlović returned to her homeplace, Serbs built an orthodox church on her land without the owner even being informed about the expropriation. Her legal battle lasted more than two decades. Last October, Strasbourg-based European Court of Human Rights, ECHR ruled in her favour. The church has to be removed by the end of this month.

The local authorities failed to implement final verdicts from 1999 and 2001 when the courts ordered that Orlović's land must be returned to her in the fullest.

"The government had not given any justification for the authorities' inaction. The court considered that such a long delay amounted to a refusal to enforce the decisions, which had left the applicants in a state of uncertainty," said ECHR.

She refused to be compensated in money and asked her children not to sell the land ever. Now that the deadline for removing the church is approaching, Fata Orlović told local media that she could finally breathe easy.

"Now my sons can't say they don't want to return because there is a church in the yard," she said a few days ago after her four-month stay in the U.S., where most of her seven children live.

Orlović, who is 78, said she experienced threats, lawsuits and attacks. The local government even sued her for spreading ethnic hate and preventing the church from working, but the court dismissed the charges. She was also attacked twice by individual police officers in 2008 and 2012, the European court's verdict said. Following the decision, local authorities decided to replace the church and not to take it down. Last month the evacuation of the interior began.

"I never lost hope, but I have certainly gone through a lot of trouble. The first thing I am going to do after they move the church is to put a fence all around my land," Orlović added.