The work of the House of Representatives of the Federal Parliament was affected by weather problems. Due to a leaking roof, buckets were placed in the hall, the session was canceled, and the date of a new meeting is currently unknown. The register of convicted pedophiles is pending, but also in the shadow of changes to the Rulebook and the appointment of Marin Vukoja.
Security reasons are a questionable explanation for the opposition. They suspect secret plans and refinement of the Rulebook.
Is only the roof of the federal parliament hall leaking, or does the roof of the ruling majority also have cracks? The scheduled session was canceled. In the hall, instead of the representatives and management, there are buckets. The management postponed the meeting for safety reasons because there was a great danger that the roof would collapse due to the deformation of the ceiling. The ruling majority was saved from the ceiling, but not from the barrage of criticism from the opposition ranks. Their reasoning regarding the security aspect is questionable.
“Obviously something is wrong among the coalition parties, that’s my impression. I don’t have information or evidence, but my impression is that additional pressure is being created on the opposition parties to let this go,” believes Dennis Gratz, DF representative in the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina (FBiH) House of Representatives.
There are numerous doubts, and the focus is on amendments to the Rulebook and the potential appointment of Marin Vukoja as a judge of the Constitutional Court of BiH. Old positions are not being abandoned. For the Opposition, voting exclusively for the first-ranked candidate is unacceptable.
The ruling party is unsuccessfully seeking a quorum at the Election and Appointment Commission. However, deadlock at the federal level is a well-known phenomenon.
“In this way, by filling the commissions as we proposed through the selection and appointment commission, what we will solve with these changes is to return the commission to the state before the Government was confirmed. If the goal was to elect Vukoja as a member of the Constitutional Court in that way, it would have been completed by then, but it was not because the SDP took a clear position and said that we wanted it to be the entire list,” said Belmin Zukan, SDP representative in the FBiH House of Representatives.
HDZ BiH is lonely in its intention to vote for the first-ranked candidate, but it does not seem it be demotivated. However, points of contention are not on the agenda of the postponed session, which has been waiting for its continuation since July.
“This was a continuation of the 4th session, so none of those disputed agenda items are in this session. No one can guarantee us the safety of holding the session, so we decided to write to the Parliamentary Assembly of BiH (PABIH) to ask them to give us the hall and to the Government of FBiH”, said Edina Gabela, vice-president of the House of Representatives of FBiH (SBiH).
And this has not been in practice until now. While waiting for a response to the request, the opposition warns that it is stealing time to make up the Rules of Procedure. There are ways to hold sessions, the question is, is there will?
“The PABiH building is the place where representatives should meet and decide. We know that during the COVID-19 pandemic, the parliament worked regularly online, and we also met in large halls,” explained Eldar Comor, SDA representative in the FBiH House of Representatives.
If doubts are excluded, and the explanation is accepted as legitimate, instead of a clear picture, other questions open up. Are rain and weather conditions a sufficient factor to stop the adoption of important decisions and the work of the Federal Parliament? The long-awaited draft law on the register of persons legally convicted of crimes against sexual freedom was supposed to be in front of the representatives. However, for now, it remains pending until better weather and the agreement of the parliamentarians.
