Deputy Chair of the Council of Ministers of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Staša Košarac, stated that the information currently published on the official website of the Office of the High Representative (OHR) represents a textbook example of political and legal falsification of the Dayton Peace Agreement.
“The OHR has assigned itself the status of an ‘ad hoc international institution’, even though Annex 10 of the Dayton Agreement defines only the existence of the High Representative and his staff, not any ad hoc international institution,” Košarac told SRNA.
He further argued that the OHR has also attributed to itself the authority to “monitor the implementation of the civilian aspects of the Peace Agreement that ended the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina,” despite the fact that such authority is not explicitly stated in the Dayton Agreement.
“Particularly concerning is the attempt on the OHR website to create the impression that the so-called Peace Implementation Council (PIC), a body not envisaged by either the Dayton Agreement or the Constitution of Bosnia and Herzegovina, somehow granted the High Representative the authority to impose laws by ‘elaborating Annex 10’. That is simply not true. Such powers do not exist in Annex 10, nor in the so-called Bonn Declaration, to which they refer,” Košarac said.
According to Košarac, when an institution has to falsify its own legal foundation, it becomes clear that such a foundation does not actually exist.
“It is therefore high time to put an end to the decades-long practice of political interference with the Dayton Agreement, justified through arbitrary interpretations and subsequently invented powers,” he added.
Košarac concluded that the OHR cannot become something that was never defined in the Dayton Agreement, nor can legitimacy be created through interpretations that, in his view, have no legal basis.
Source: Glas Srpske
