It is not true that EU officials told Bosnian Croat leader Dragan Covic that Bosnia would achieve EU candidate status if it changes its election law within the next two months and especially not if this is done according to the model his party is proposing, the centre-left Democratic Front said on Wednesday.
The party reacted to a statement Covic, the Speaker of the House of Peoples and leader of Bosnia’s Croat Democratic Union (HDZ BiH), made earlier that day.
Covic spent the past two days in Brussels along with House of Representatives Speaker Denis Zvizdic. They spoke to several EU officials, including enlargement commissioner Oliver Varhelyi.
“During all the talks I emphasised that we made significant steps forward, the realistic dynamic is that we inform the EU on the progress we achieved by the end of February so that we can by the end of March agree on a new Election Law,” Covic said, arguing that this is what the EU wants to see done in Bosnia for the country to achieve candidate status.
“It is a complete lie that any EU official told Covic or any other member of Bosnia’s delegation that Bosnia and Herzegovina will acheive candidate status for membership in the European Union if changes of the Election Law are implemented within the next two months,” said a press releae by the DF, adding that this is especially not the case if those changes are implemented according to the “segregationist, discriminatory and racist model” which Covic’s party is proposing.
The party accused the HDZ and Covic of “pathologically lying” to strengthen their political position.
“The only thing that may be true about Covic’s visit to Brussels are the media reports saying that he went there again and, using tested moethods of propaganda, spoke about the alleged danger of the creation of a so-called Islamic State, which is part of the pathology of Covic and the HDZ,” the party said.
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Bosnia’s election law is an issue political leaders have been bickering about for years, without ever managing to reach a compromise.
The problems stem from two court rulings.
One of them is a 2009 ruling by the European Court of Human Rights which said that Bosnia must allow minorities the right to run for certain posts.
According to the 1995 Dayton Peace Agreement, the country’s presidency consists of representatives of Bosnia’s three constituent peoples – the Bosniaks, the Serbs and the Croats. The House of Peoples is also filled with members of only those groups.
The Court found that this violates the rights of the country’s minorities and ordered Bosnia to change it.
The other ruling was handed down by Bosnia’s Constitutional Court in 2016.
The Court ruled partially in favour of a complaint lodged by Bosnian Croat politician and former HDZ member Bozo Ljubic, who complained about the state election law provision dictating that cantons delegate at least one representative from each of the country’s three main ethnic groups to the upper chamber of the Federation (FBiH), the semi-autonomous entity in the country shared mostly between Bosniaks and Croats.
He argued that the Croat influence in cantons with a majority Bosniak population was unfairly diminished in the process of selecting FBiH MPs.
According to Ljubic, Croat candidates should be elected from majority Croat cantons exclusively.
The Constitutional Court declared that part of the law unconstitutional and gave political representatives six months to agree on how to amend it.
This was never done until now, mostly because the HDZ BiH and the main Bosniak party in the country, the Party for Democratic Action (SDA), failed to reach a compromise.
Officials from the SDA, as well as from a number of left-leaning and citizen-oriented parties argued that changing the law the way the HDZ wants it would effectively divide Bosnia into separate regions based on ethnicity – which would contradict the EU Human Rights Court ruling.
