Bosnia’s Constitutional Court never took away any land from the country’s Serb-majority region, the leader of Serbia’s Liberal Democratic Party, Cedomir Jovanovic, told Serbia’s public broadcaster on Tuesday, arguing that authorities in the semi-autonomous region had started to sell off the land that belonged to Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Jovanovic was talking about the latest political crisis in Bosnia.
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The parliament of the Serb-majority semi-autonomous part of Bosnia, Republika Srpska (RS), on Monday instructed its representatives in state institutions to stop participating in any decision-making processes until a law removing the foreign judges from the Constitutional Court is adopted.
State institutions will effectively be blocked.
The move came after the Constitutional Court declared that public agricultural property in Republika Srpska should be owned by the state and not by the RS.
According to the Constitution, which is part of the 1995 Dayton Peace Agreement, the Constitutional Court is composed of nine judges – two Bosniaks, two Croats, two Serbs and three foreigners. Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik has been accusing the institution of working against Republika Srpska, arguing that the three foreign judges frequently side with the Bosniaks and outvote the Croats and the Serbs.
“It is a lie that the Constitutional Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina took away the agricultural land of Republika Srpska. The truth is that they (RS authorities) began to sell off the land, took the money, and had no right to do so,” Jovanovic said.
With the controversial RS law on agricultural land, RS authorities “tried to take away what can not be taken away from Bosnia and Herzegovina, which is the state of Serbs just as much as it is the state of Bosniaks and Croats,” he said.
He also expressed strong doubt that Dodik’s efforts to remove the foreign judges from the Constitutional Court will work.
