Articles for category: Bosnien und Herzegowina

Not a Curtain Drop, but an Abuse of Rights

The recent Grand Chamber decision in Kovačević v. Bosnia and Herzegovina might send shockwaves through the legal and political landscape in Bosnia and Herzegovina or even across Council of Europe states, as Professor Joseph Marko suggests in his article. However, his analysis presents an incomplete picture of the Court’s decision and overlooks critical context necessary for a full understanding of why the Grand Chamber declared the application inadmissible.

26. August 2025

A Fallen Curtain and Open Questions

On 25 June 2025, the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights delivered its Decision on Kovačević v. BiH. This ruling could completely change the legal assessment of strict ethnic quota systems in political institutions for worse. While the case originates from Bosnia and Herzegovina, it will likely have far-reaching political consequences for other power-sharing systems in and beyond Europe, as well. Crucially, it is prone to “overrule” all previous judgments of the ECtHR against BiH. This means that it will render all future efforts to support constitutional reform in the country futile, because it seems to legitimize the de facto strict ethno-national cartel of power materialized in its constitution.

11. August 2025

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Dodik’s Defiant Secessionist Constitution

The new Draft Constitution, passed by the National Assembly of Republika Srpska on March 13, 2025, represents the culmination of the tensions between the sub-national entity and the central government of BiH. The Draft Constitution is more than an attempt to shield Republika Srpska President Milorad Dodik from criminal responsibility in light of his active arrest warrant. Instead, the sweeping changes introduced in the Draft Constitution mark one of the most drastic attempts to date to use legal reform to defy the constitutional order and institutions of BiH.

8. April 2025

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The Tipping Point in BiH’s Constitutional Struggle

On 26 February, the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina sentenced the President of the Republic of Srpska, Milorad Dodik, to one year in prison, with an additional six-year prohibition from holding office. Dodik was found guilty of failing to comply with the decisions of the High Representative in BiH, the office instituted in Annex 10 of the Dayton Peace Agreement. The verdict marks the conclusion of the ongoing tensions between Milorad Dodik and the Office of HR, reflecting broader calls of the former for a return to the “original Dayton”.

8. April 2025

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Symbols that Keep Us Apart

In a significant development for Bosnia and Herzegovina, in February 2025, the Constitutional Court suspended the controversial Emblem Law Amendments allowing the use of foreign state symbols alongside the symbols of Republika Srpska in public institutions and official documents. This is one of the latest legal maneuvers challenging the constitutional framework established by the Dayton Peace Agreement. Moreover, it highlights Republika Srpska’s ongoing efforts to redefine its relationship with the central state, risking deepening ethnic divisions.

19. März 2025

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The High Representative Strikes Again

In March 2024, the High Representative (HR) in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), Christian Schmidt, once again used his “Bonn powers” under the Dayton Peace Agreement which, inter alia, enable him to impose substantial legislation. After a dark warning, he enacted a new package of reforms concerning the electoral process. While these reforms reflect the necessary and desirable changes in the process of the EU accession, concurrently resolving a political stalemate, this schmidtian mode also creates further political cleavages. Nevertheless, arguably a “Smith” has found a fairly clever way forward.

11. April 2024

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The Kovačević Case Revisited

On 20 March 2023 the Council of the European Union gave Bosnia and Hercegovina green light to start accession negotiations. However, despite this political endorsement, BiH must fulfill the conditionality criteria, including a series of six judgments by the ECtHR relating to the predetermined ethnic keys. The last case, Kovačević v. BiH, was referred to the Grand Chamber in December 2023. If the Court follows its previous case law, this should force the mono-ethnic political parties and their leaders as well as the EU institutions to insist on de-blocking the constitutional impasse for any realistic steps towards European integration.

28. März 2024

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Why are illiberal monuments legally possible? Some insights from Bosnia and Herzegovina

After unveiling a monument to the genocide denier Peter Handke a few years ago, local authorities in Banja Luka – the largest city of Bosnia’s Serb-dominated Republika Srpska entity – are now building a massive monument to the soldiers of the Bosnian Serb Army (VRS) who died in the war of 1992–95. The memorial site in Banja Luka is not the first dedicated to the VRS. On the contrary, it follows the example of other towns and municipalities in the Serb-dominated areas. Together, they form an illiberal politics of remembrance developed by Bosnia, and especially Republika Srpska, since the end of the war in the 1990s. This memory politics is marked by the denial of war atrocities and the glorification of war criminals. The ongoing construction of the monument in Banja Luka shows that, almost thirty years after the conflict, there is a need to establish a new and comprehensive legal framework for memorialization in Bosnia. In essence, memorialization should be aligned with human rights and enable the development of a democratic culture. To achieve this twofold goal, constitutional and legislative reforms are needed.

21. November 2023

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False Hope for Democracy in Bosnia & Herzegovina

Bosnia & Herzegovina (B&H) is notoriously hard to govern. Scarred from a bloody war in the 1990s after the collapse of Yugoslavia, the country’s constitutional order emerged in international peace talks in the United States. What later became famous as the Dayton Peace Agreement (DPA) might have stopped the war but, in our opinion, sowed the seeds for complex democratic problems today. As we will show in this text, the ECtHR’s judgments represent a false hope for democracy in B&H, because ethnopolitical parties in B&H will not agree on how to implement the ECtHR’s judgments and the Office of the High Representative will not take a more active role in this context. We therefore argue against an earlier contribution on this blog by Woelk (2023), who suggested that the solution for the implementation of the ECtHR’s judgments should come from within the country, as we will show, ethnopolitical actors do not have a real interest in implementing these judgments. To put it bluntly, change from within is, alas, pie in the sky. It is much more likely that nothing changes and the powers that are remain the powers that will be.

1. Oktober 2023

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Opening Pandora’s Box?

Bosnia and Herzegovina is widely known as a “complex State” that has struggled to progress towards EU accession due to internal divisions. More than 25 years after the war ended, the country seems to remain stuck in transition. Recently, secession claims from Republika Srpska (RS) have become more concrete, a crisis has been triggered around the Constitutional Court. Amid these dynamic developments, a judgment by the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) could cause tensions, if not even the opening of Pandora’s box: After a series of previous judgments of a similar kind, on 29 August, 2023, the ECtHR published its judgment in the case of Kovačević v. Bosnia and Herzegovina. The judgment is a fundamental and systemic critique of the power-sharing arrangements and clearly determines the direction any constitutional amendment or reform needs to take: The only possible way is to reduce the institutional relevance of ethnicity and of the privileged status of ‘constituent peoples’.

1. September 2023

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