Ambassadors who criticised the Alliance of Independent Social Democrats (SNSD) in regard to the failure to amend Bosnia’s Law on Criminal Procedure (CPC) have no one to blame but themselves as they were the ones who supported the establishment of Bosnia’s current government, a representative of the party said.

The Embassies of Canada, France, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, Spain, Turkey, United Kingdom, United States, and the OHR and OSCE wrote in a letter last Wednesday saying that they are “deeply concerned about the evident lack of genuine interest by HDZ BiH and SNSD in implementing the decision of the BiH Constitutional Court on the BiH Criminal Procedure Code (CPC),” and that the inaction of those parties will “severely undermine the fight against corruption and organized crime” in the country.

“It is simply unbelievable that ambassadors blame a political party that is in the opposition and that does not have that type of competency which those parties in power do,” the SNSD’s member of Bosnia’s Parliament, Dusanka Majkic, said.

Majkic said that most of the ambassadors who wrote the letter criticising her party had supported the forming of Bosnia’s current government and that they should now not blame anyone else for what is happening.

“When you make a bad match then you get bad results,” she said.

Majkic criticised the country’s government for rejecting a proposal for the amendment of the law that came from the Ministry of Justice. She said the law was created by “foreigners” together with the main Bosniak party in the country, the Party for Democratic Action (SDA).

“In this country, it is a practice that the strength of arguments of ambassadors is stronger than of arguments of the Justice Minister,” she said.

She said the SNSD supports finding a solution but added that laws created under someone’s patronage will hardly be agreed on.

In their letter, the ambassadors directly named her party as one of the two culprits.

“These parties have, through the amendments proposed by HDZ BiH (Croatian Democratic Union), pushed for changes to the CPC by the BiH Parliamentary Assembly that are not in line with International standards, while opposing amendments that would meet those standards and also assure prosecutorial and judicial effectiveness at the BiH state level.” the letter reads.

“Moreover, they have created procedural obstacles in the BiH Parliamentary Assembly for the adoption of any CPC amendments,” it states.

The embassies and organisations that signed the letter “find the apparent effort by these parties to create legal gaps and strip the state judicial institutions of the tools to effectively fight organised crime and corruption completely unacceptable,” adding that such an approach makes the leaders and representatives of these two parties “directly responsible for the potential further expansion of organized crime and corruption throughout BiH, to the detriment of all citizens.”