On 25 March 2010, Mr Pieter Everaers, Director of External cooperation, communication and key indicators at Eurostat and Ambassador Dimitris Kourkoulas, the Head of the Delegation of the European Union to Bosnia and Herzegovina, had a meeting to clarify some census issues with the ad hoc commission for Preparing the Law on Population and Household Census and with Joint Committee on European Integration at the Parliament of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Mr Everaers recalled the European and international standards guiding the organisation of a population census. All the EU member states, candidate and potential candidate countries will conduct the next decennial census in 2011. This period also applies to potential candidate countries like Bosnia and Herzegovina. EU and other international standards should be applied to guarantee the comparability and the credibility of the census results.

The issues of including questions about ethnicity, language and religion in the census questionnaire and the enumeration of persons from Bosnia and Herzegovina living abroad (diaspora) were discussed.

According to the EU standards, questions about ethnicity, language and religion are not obligatory and, if included, the respondent should be free to reply or not.

Director Everaers recommended Members of the BiH Parliamentary Assembly to agree on the Law on Population and Household Census as early as possible in order to begin preparations for a pilot census, which is due in 2010. He particularly stressed that delays in the approval of the Law may exclude Bosnia and Herzegovina from the 2011 census round in Europe and put its European integration process at risk.

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Pieter Everaers is director of the Directorate External Cooperation, communication and key indicators in Eurostat, the Statistical Office of the European Union. He has a PhD in social sciences. In his current position at Eurostat he is the highest responsible in the European Commission for the cooperation on statistics with the candidate and pre candidate countries in the Western Balkan. He is representing the European Commission and Eurostat in international statistical meetings with several organisations like UN and OECD. In his career he has been involved in census preparations and census taking. Currently he is also personally involved in the monitoring of the census preparations in Iraq, Afghanistan and Kosovo.