Strasbourg Court Piles Rights Pressure on Bosnia

The European Court of Human Rights, ECHR, on July 15 backed Azra Zornic in her suit against the state of Bosnia and Herzegovina in a case concerning people’s rights to run for top posts in the country.

The new ruling puts Bosnia under renewed pressure to change the way it is governed since it echoes the 2009 ruling by the same court in the case of Sejdic and Finci.

Dervo Sejdic, a Roma, and Jakob Finci, a Jew, won their case against Bosnia, which the court said should change its constitution to allow ethnic minorities run for posts in the state-level Presidency and the House of Peoples.

These posts are currently reserved for members of the country’s so-called constituent nationalities, Bosniaks, Serbs and Croats.

Zornic complained before the same court that she was unable to run for these posts because she had declared her identity as a citizen of Bosnia and Herzegovina without any ethnic affiliation.

“As the applicant does not declare affiliation with any of the ‘constituent peoples’ but simply as a citizen of Bosnia and Herzegovina, she is ineligible to stand for election to the second chamber of the State parliament [the House of Peoples] and to the collective Head of State [the Presidency],” the ECHR noted in its ruling.

“The finding of a violation in the present case was the direct result of the failure of the authorities of the respondent State to introduce measures to ensure compliance with the judgment in Sejdić and Finci,” it added.

Bosnia contested the case before the court. The Bosnian representative in the ECHR, Monika Mijic, told state television, BHRT, on Tuesday that the ruling was not acceptable as it infringed on Bosnia’s sovereignty.

“We will submit a demand to question this ruling considering that it is unimplementable and affects the sovereignty of every member state of the Council of Europe,” Mijic said.

However, the court said Bosnia’s constitutional provisions were never designed to be permanent.

The ECHR said that the “impugned constitutional provisions were put in place when a very fragile ceasefire was in effect on the ground and that the provisions were designed to end a brutal conflict marked by genocide and ‘ethnic cleansing’.

“The nature of the conflict was such that the approval of the ‘constituent peoples’ was necessary to ensure peace,” the ECHR said, referring to the last months of the 1992-5 war in Bosnia.

“However, now, more than eighteen years after the end of the tragic conflict, there could no longer be any reason for the maintenance of the contested constitutional provisions.

“The Court considers that the time has come for a political system which will provide every citizen of Bosnia and Herzegovina with the right to stand for elections to the Presidency and the House of Peoples of Bosnia and Herzegovina without discrimination based on ethnic affiliation and without granting special rights for constituent people to the exclusion of minorities or citizens,” it added.

Whether anything will happens as a result of the court ruling is unclear.

After the Sejdic and Finci ruling in December 2009, the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe adopted three interim resolutions urging the authorities to take all the necessary steps and implement it.

Several attempts have been made over the past five years to agree on ways to implement the Sejdic and Finci ruling but the main political parties have yet to agree on them.