The amendments to the Election Law of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) brought by High Representative Christian Schmidt are important and necessary for more transparent elections, says former international judge of the Constitutional Court of BiH and professor of constitutional law in Graz Joseph Marko.
On Wednesday, July 27th, Schmidt imposed changes to the Electoral Law related to the integrity of the electoral process, but, according to BiH officials, he gave up from a package of “political changes” after public outcry.
The adopted changes refer to higher amounts of fines for violations of the law and the electoral process, but also prevention of misuse of public resources for political purposes, prohibition of hate speech and a number of other decisions to prevent electoral fraud.
Days before the decision was made, there was speculation in BiH about the content of Christian Schmidt’s package of third-order Bonn powers, especially the part that, according to the document published in the media, refers to the election of delegates to the House of Peoples of the Parliament of the Federation of BiH (FBiH).
Planned decisions, which Schmidt only temporarily gave up and gave BiH officials a chance to once again try to agree on their own, after a series of unsuccessful negotiations that lasted a year, a threshold of three percent from each canton for each of the three constituent nations is foreseen.
Only from the cantons that cross that threshold would delegates be appointed to the FBiH House of Peoples, which, says Marko, would be a violation of fundamental human rights. General elections in BiH are scheduled for October 2nd, 2022.
RSE: Do you think that the leaders of the parties in BiH will use the time they got and come to a compromise solution on the electoral reform?
Marko: I could only speculate about that. These technical changes to the Election Law are very important, necessary. In my conversation with several young people in BiH, they pointed out to me open abuses, voter blackmail and how cheap it is.
RSE: How do you see the role of the high representative in BiH, bearing in mind that part of BiH or at least officials in the Republika Srpska (RS) entity say that they do not respect the high representative or his decisions, but also the latest reactions in Sarajevo, first of all, regarding the electoral changes?
Marko: Well, I think you must clearly see that there is a complete change in the situation after the 2006 general elections.
After the 2006 elections, the High Representative and his legal department were very influential in order to establish a much more integrated state, when I already mentioned the border police, but also the introduction of the value–added tax, and not least the military integration of the armies, at least on paper.
But with the issue of police reform, all these reform efforts to stabilize not only the political but also the economic system of BiH came to an end, when the election results once again gave full power to three uninational parties, claiming that they alone can represent the will and interests of the constituent peoples.
And since 2006, all reform efforts have been constantly blocked by what I call the power cartel of SNSD (Union of Independent Social Democrats) and Milorad Dodik, SDA (Party of Democratic Action) and HDZ (Croatian Democratic Union).
These three monoethnic parties actually form a “divide and conquer” ethnically segregated power cartel.
I believe that this is now the basic problem of BiH, how to overcome the complete “ethnification” of institutions and the state captivity of institutions that enables those three mono-ethnic parties to win elections every time, Radio Slobodna Evropa reports.
E.Dz.
