Yesterday, Milorad Dodik said that SNSD will not form the Council of Ministers of BiH until the Constitutional Court of BiH is reformed. This demand appears to be a negotiating tactic, with a maximalist request to secure concessions on other issues.
After the party’s Presidency session in Banja Luka, the SNSD president set the Constitutional Court as a condition for any talks about the state government.
“The Constitutional Court is something that must be definitively resolved. It must be resolved before establishing the Council of Ministers. If someone wants to see SNSD in the government in BiH, they will see us only if the Constitutional Court of BiH is reformed,” Dodik said.
The SNSD demands the departure of foreign judges and a composition in which each of the constituent peoples would have three judges, along with a mechanism that would, as Dodik claimed, prevent outvoting. He completely rejected the court’s practices over the past ten years and also demanded the annulment of decisions made by high representatives that were not confirmed by the Parliamentary Assembly of BiH.
These demands are not new. The SNSD and SDS have previously submitted a similar model into the parliamentary procedure through a draft law on the Constitutional Court, but it never gained support. Therefore, yesterday’s ultimatum resembles more an opening of negotiations with the highest possible price, after which concessions would be sought on other issues.
According to the Constitution of BiH, which is Annex 4 of the Dayton Peace Agreement, the Constitutional Court has nine judges. Four are elected by the House of Parliament of the FBiH, two by the National Assembly of Republika Srpska, and three by the President of the European Court of Human Rights after consulting with the Presidency of BiH.
The Constitution leaves the possibility for the Parliamentary Assembly to change the method of electing foreign judges by law, but not the character of the court or its composition. The request “three judges from each people” requires a change to the Constitution, i.e., Dayton, which the SNSD usually invokes as the “original” framework.
The former member of the Presidency of BiH, Šefik Džaferović, has previously warned Klix.ba that the court is the way it is because the constitutional system provides numerous opportunities for blockades.
“If someone thinks they can keep the entity voting, entities, and everything else, while changing the character of the Constitutional Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina and its jurisdictions, they are tampering with the so-called Dayton balance, and that is simply not possible,” Džaferović said.
The inability to implement blockades is part of the same logic. In June 2023, the Constitutional Court deleted the provision in its rules requiring the presence of at least one judge from the Republika Srpska for a plenary session, allowing the court to make decisions even without them.
Republika Srpska Does Not Choose Judges, Yet Answers to Court
The National Assembly of Republika Srpska (NSRS) has spent years refusing to elect two judges from its quota, although it is its constitutional obligation. Following the retirement of Miodrag Simović and Zlatko Knežević, the president of the NSRS, Nenad Stevandić, announced in December 2023 that Republika Srpska will not appoint judges, as he said, to what he called a “rump” Constitutional Court.
Constitutional Court President Mirsad Ćeman warned against this, stating that the missing judges should be elected on time so that no one could bring the legitimacy of the court into question.
At the same time, the institutions of Republika Srpska still participate in proceedings before this court. Last week, the NSRS Committee proposed to the Constitutional Court of BiH to reject a request for the evaluation of the constitutionality of the Law on Inheritance submitted by Kemal Ademović.
To recall, the US Representative to the UN Security Council, Tammy Bruce, stated in May 2026, while bidding farewell to Christian Schmidt, that during his mandate, the secessionist laws of Republika Srpska were withdrawn and the authority of the Constitutional Court of BiH was recognized. She cited respect for the court’s decisions as one of the proofs that the state is stable.
The authorities in Banja Luka presented this speech as their own victory, although it has singled out the Constitutional Court as the institution whose authority is respected.
This has put the authorities in Republika Srpska in a paradoxical situation. The aim is to “drive out” foreigners and show that the Constitutional Court is currently not fulfilling its function, while at the same time the US administration highlights the Constitutional Court of BiH as an example of state functionality, and a functional state is precisely the prerequisite for foreigners to leave Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The demand to drive out the foreign judges also has long-standing support from Belgrade. The former president of Serbia, Aleksandar Vučić, who resigned in late September and whose SNS party lost the elections on October 25, criticized the Constitutional Court of BIH as far back as his writings in the 1990s. In early 2022, he reiterated this stance regarding the decision on state property.
“That was foreseen for five years, and 25 years have passed. The judges should have been elected,” Vučić said at the time.
The Dayton arrangement of Bosnia and Herzegovina represents a balance and a mix of a civic and ethnic system, and the negotiators representing a stronger ethnic principle could not build such a mechanism into the functioning of the Constitutional Court of BiH even during the Dayton negotiations in 1995.
Dodik’s demands essentially only amplify the importance of the Constitutional Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina; in its current form and with its current decision-making method, it cannot be a subject of trade whose starting position is blackmail. An ethnic veto in the Constitutional Court would also render the very idea of legality meaningless, because law and statutes have no ethnic affiliation.
