The laws regulating the conflict of interests at the level of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina (FBiH) and Canton Sarajevo (CS) are not harmonized, which creates a problem in the fight against double political functions and seems like a futile process at lower levels of government.
The Government of the CS passed a decree establishing the Office for Combating Corruption and Quality Management, and the law under which the Office operates stipulates in Article 12 that it is competent to initiate the procedure for determining conflicts of interest and that it can impose sanctions on the holder of public office who is in an established conflict of interest.
”In my political activity, I strongly fought for the adoption of a new federal law on conflict of interest because it is one of the key laws for opening negotiations with the European Union (EU). Also, my colleague Sasa Magazinovic led the same fight at the state level. I believe that this area must be regulated in accordance with the constitutional system of BiH, where it is clearly stipulated in the state laws that laws in this area are passed by the state, the entities, and the Brcko District. Also, the management of the prevention of conflicts of interest must be in accordance with GRECO (the Group of States against Corruption) recommendations and international conventions, which this law in the canton is certainly not,” Irfan Cengic (SDP) stated.
”So in this situation, we have two laws that are in force but regulate the matter differently. It is true that for part of the federal law, there is no body for part of the conflict of interest, but there is a body for solving the incompatibility of functions. In fact, I noticed in public discourse that politicians and the media do not really understand what is an incompatibility of function and what is a conflict of interest. It is problematic that certain activities which by their description are criminal offenses and should be the subject of prosecution are described as a misdemeanor in this law, so the perpetrators could knowingly register for a misdemeanor in order to be fined, and then they could not be tried for a criminal offense,” Cengic added.
Cengic also emphasized that, in addition to the federal law, it is important to adopt a new state law. He also announced that he will work to collect signatures for an appeal to the Constitutional Court regarding the problematic law, which requires 12 signatures of representatives in the CS Assembly.
FBiH vs. CS
The law that regulates the conflict of interest exists at the level of the FBiH entity, so it is by no means possible to claim that, since it is a ”dead letter”, the CS should decide on its own how to proceed.
”We as an office have had a lot of these cases. When we go back to the genesis, I think that in 2002 the story begins with the Law on Conflict of Interest at the level of the Federation. The biggest enemy of society in BiH is making hasty decisions. When the law was passed, someone wrote it ineptly, so we had an absolute absurdity that, for example, public constitutional institutions, health insurance institutes, hospitals, clinics, and various institutions are where most of the taxpayers’ money comes from, someone who wrote the law did not know how to distinguish between a public institution and a public company,” said Nermin Vila, a lawyer from Sarajevo.
He pointed out that his office received the last decision at the Court of BiH in a case in which no conflict of interest was established regarding the mayor of Bihac.
”This was the last person, some eight years ago, on whom the law was implemented, the federal law that had been functioning until then. Then a law was passed at the state level that abolished the most important, which is the body that pronounces sanctions, which until then was the Central Election Commission (CEC). The Law on Conflict of Interest in the FBiH had finality through administrative proceedings and administrative disputes. Unfortunately, it became non-functional with these decisions,” Vila explained.
The FBiH government established a proposal for a law on the prevention of interest in August 2022, when the Federal Ministry of Justice explained that the law will define in more detail and comprehensively what a conflict of interest is, announcing that it will now also cover public institutions, Klix.ba writes.
E.Dz.
