Member of the Democratic Action Party in the House of Representatives of the Parliamentary Assembly of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Safet Kešo, assessed that the amendments to the Law on the High Judicial and Prosecutorial Council (HJPC) proposed by the Council of Ministers of Bosnia and Herzegovina were wrong steps.
He reminded that a very clear text was reached in 2020, which was fully aligned with the positions of the Venice Commission, the European Commission and others.
“Today they deviated, these deviations started at that May session of the Council of Ministers, later there were amendments that tried to fix what was broken at that session, but it was not fixed until the end,” Kešo said.
He considers the article of the amendments to be indicative, which was clear and should have stated that the conflict of interest is also represented by side relatives.
“That article should have been retained in its entirety, and that is what the Venice Commission and Europe demanded of us. However, they apparently made a variant in which they said that in order to achieve transparency, they would publish the names of all relatives. They left room to regulate these issues more precisely with the rulebook, and that is room for abuse,” he explained.
Kešo says that it is necessary to define what are direct relatives, and what are side relatives, and that only what the Venice and European Commission requested of Bosnia and Herzegovina should be respected.
Amendments to the Law on the High Judicial and Prosecutorial Council of Bosnia and Herzegovina were proposed by the Council of Ministers of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and it is a law that needs to be passed because it is one of the 14 priorities that the European Commission put before Bosnia and Herzegovina in response to Bosnia and Herzegovina’s request for membership in the European Union, Fena reports.
