Nezavisne novine: According to estimations of the American government, there is around 6.000 children living in BiH, who do not have a name and whose birth was never registered.
"For the majority of those children it is believed that they are of Roma origin. This brings us to many obstacles for those children to access different benefits as are education and health care services", has been published in the report on human rights in BiH, which the State Department has published several days ago.
Jasminka Džumhur, ombudsman for human rights of BiH, says that the problem is in the fact that those children, since they have not been registered, do not have a personal identification number, which is a basis for achieving of all other rights.
"Without the identification number, the access to the school is impossible, it is impossible to get a health care protection and other benefits", she has said.
She also adds that one of the ways in which it would be possible to solve this is to compare the evidences on registered births in the hospitals with a number of parents who come to register a birth of their children.
"In Italy, parents who do not do it, are automatically sent to the office of the authorized tribunal on processing", she has warned.
Unregistered children stop the abolishment of visas
Solving the problem of unregistered children is one of the conditions for putting BiH on the white Schengen list, or for abolishing the visa regime of BiH with the majority of countries of the EU. "It is very clear that this problem is not only a question of violation of human rights of those children, but the problem of all of us", has been warned by Jasminka Džumhur, ombudsman for human rights of BiH.
Džumhur also says that the problem is not only in Rome children, because without the identification numbers have also been left the children whose parents have during the war somehow lost their identification numbers as well.
According to her, the problem is also in mutual non-harmonization of the entity laws, and then in their non-harmonization with the state law.
Nela Kačmarčik, communication servant of the UNICEF, says that it is about a serious violation of the Convention on child rights of the UN, which speaks of the fact that each child has a right on name and nationality.
"The big question is what happens with those children when they come to doctor, because for the state those kids do not exist. Would the doctor have pity over that child and offer him/her a help? For the UNICEF, that is a key question", she has said.
Saliha Đuderija, deputy minister for human rights of BiH, says that it is being worked on imposing the provision that each child under the age of 18 unconditionally gets the health protection which he/she needs, in the changes and amendments of the Law on health care protection.
"In some cantons of the Federation, it is already inuring, but in some other cases the doctors have been applying this silently for awhile. It happens that parents themselves register those children under another name, so those children usually get the protection they need", she has said. According to her, bigger problem is in the indolent parents, who have not registered their children; they usually do not even want to take their kids to doctors.
Saliha Đuderija says that her ministry along with the UNHCR and the UNICEF has formed the mobile teams which do the registration of such children, and that through those actions more than 2.000 children have been registered, so the total number has been reduced by that.
Šaha Ahmetović, chairman of the Association of Romas "Veseli brijeg", says that she has met some cases of Romas who have not registered their children after their birth.
She says that in one case it was about an unwedded couple, where one spouse has fictively got married to a godfather in Sweden in order to get the Swedish documents.
"After they got refused by the Embassy, the child was born, and now either the godfather from Sweden should approve that child as his own, either those two must get divorced", she has said.
In another case, a woman has left her husband from Germany and she has then in an illegitimate community in BiH got a child with a man who has died.
In that case as well, she says, a husband from Germany should approve this child, or they should divorce.
"My recommendation is to simplify the procedures as much as possible, in order for more children to get registered and become a part of society", Ahmetović has said.