This 20th Republika Srpska (RS) Report to the UN Security Council focuses on BiH’s recent elections and the RS’s agenda as the formation of a new Government approaches. In BiH’s general elections earlier this month, RS citizens gave the RS’s current governing coalition a clear mandate to govern according to the positions and goals it laid out during the campaign, including the full
implementation of the BiH Constitution. The RS stands ready to work with all stakeholders in
BiH on issues important to everyone in the country. The RS is also eager to work with all
interested members of the international community.
This report examines how the highly decentralized constitutional structure of BiH has been
unlawfully replaced by a dysfunctional centralized state that regularly violates the rule of law
and threatens BiH’s peace and security. This decentralized system of government was
established by the BiH Constitution in Annex 4 of the 1995 Dayton Accords.
Through years of illegal decrees and coercion, the High Representative (HR) significantly altered
the decentralized constitutional structure established under the Dayton Accords in violation of
BiH’s Constitution and the HR’s own authority granted to him by the treaty parties under Annex
10 of the Accords. In effect, the HR’s actions have given BiH’s Bosniak parties—chiefly the
SDA—precisely what the Dayton Accords were designed to prevent: a centralized state that
Bosniaks—as the most populous of BiH’s Constituent Peoples—could control to the detriment of
BiH’s other Constituent Peoples.
As the HR’s unlawful abuse of power has been criticized and diminished in recent years, the
SDA has used illegally-created BiH institutions such as the BiH Prosecutor’s Office to
undermine further the fundamental rights of the Serb and Croat Peoples and the autonomy of the
two Entities guaranteed under the Dayton Accords to protect such rights.
The RS Government insists that the allocation of governmental competencies and protections for
Constituent Peoples established by the Dayton Constitution be restored and the system of
government wisely crafted and guaranteed by the Dayton Accords no longer be undermined but
fully implemented. Those who have sought to illegally centralize BiH often blame the country’s
political dysfunction on the Dayton structure. But in reality, it is the failure to uphold and
implement the Dayton structure that is the reason for such dysfunction.
FULL REPORT:
