The report has been released as part of a public debate on whether Bosnia respects international obligations in education.
The reason for the segregation is that each of the 10 cantons making up the Croat-Muslim entity has its own ministry of education and that there are as many as seven educational institutes.
As a result of that, there are 54 examples of two schools under one roof in which, for example, Muslim and Croat pupils and their teachers do not come into contact because they have separate entrances, recesses at different times, and teachers have separate staff rooms.
Following strong international pressure in July and August 2003, the cantonal interior ministries issued directions on the administrative and legal unification of said schools. The Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe report, however, says that virtually no progress has been made.
This is contrary to the commitment Bosnia took upon joining the Council of Europe in 2002 to abolish segregation in the education system. In November that year, the two entities' education ministers signed a document guaranteeing that children whose families returned to prewar areas would be educated in integrated multicultural schools without religious or cultural segregation. According to the OSCE report, the situation in some areas has not changed since then.
The report also points to the need to change schools' names and place religious symbols in classrooms for religious teaching. In some schools in monoethnic areas, for example in the Serb entity, religious symbols are still displayed in hallways and classrooms. The situation is similar in some areas in the other entity.
The report notes that in Una-Sana and Sarajevo cantons pupils have been brought to political rallies.
OSCE Mission chief Douglas Davidson has recently underlined the importance of implementing the document adopted by the two entities' education ministers in November 2002. He has also pointed to a law on primary and secondary education on the state level adopted in June 2003 and recalled that in July 2004 the high representative to Bosnia had to force cantons which refused to carry out reforms in education to do so. According to Davidson, the situation in said cantons is virtually unchanged.