The Dayton Peace Agreement prescribes the rejection of constitutionality, a concept the European Court of Human Rights said was not in line with the European legal system and which was imposed in Bosnia by genocide and ethnic cleansing, the leader of the Democratic Front (DF), Zeljko Komsic, said in a statement.

Komsic is running for the post of the Croat member of Bosnia’s tripartite Presidency in the upcoming general election on October 7. The institution is composed of representatives of what Bosnia’s Constitution refers to ‘constituent’ peoples – Bosniaks, Croats and Serbs.

The concept is unacceptable to the EU and to many in Bosnia itself as it only allows members of those three groups to be presidents or members of the upper house of the Parliament, therefore it excludes Jews, Roma and all other minorities from ever holding those posts.

The EU human rights court ruled in four separate cases that the concept is violating human rights.

But the most vigorous defenders of this concept are Bosnian Croat and Bosnian Serb nationalists. The main Bosnian Croat party, the Croat Democratic Union (HDZ), rejects any effort to abolish the principle of constitutionality and to adopt the European citizen's concept, such as letting everybody run for any post or the one-person-one-vote principle in elections.

But the problem lies in the 1995 U.S. brokered Dayton Peace Agreement and its attached Constitution which says Bosnia will apply the European Convention on Human Rights but also that only Bosniaks, Croats or Serbs can be presidents.

This is why both the supporters of constitutionality, like the HDZ, and its critics, like Komsic, cite the Constitution, although different parts of it, when arguing their point.

“The systematic discrimination which stems from the so-called constitutional peoples concept also directly breaches Annexe 6, which is exactly the part where a civic concept is defined in Bosnia, as it speaks of (…) the protection of individual human rights and not the protection of collective rights,” Komsic’s statement said.

All those who say that implementing the rulings of the European Court of Human Rights represent a breach of the Constitution are “deliberately mistaken and are deceiving people, as the exact opposite is the case,” Komsic concluded.