Bosniak leader Bakir Izetbegovic said the Democratic Action Party's (SDA) caucus in Bosnia's Parliamentary Assembly will call on other caucuses to file criminal charges against Serb leader Milorad Dodik and President of Bosnia's Serb-dominated entity of Republika Srpska Zeljka Cvijanovic, on Friday, calling on the Chief Prosecutor Gordana Tadic to sanction all those undermining the country's Constitutional order.
“The SDA caucus in Bosnia's House of Representatives will call on other caucuses to file respective criminal charges against Milorad Dodik and Zeljka Cvijanovic,” the leader of the SDA Bakir Izetbegovic said during a press conference.
He called on Bosnia's top judicial institution in charge of appointing and disciplining judges in Bosnia, the High Judicial and Prosecutorial Council (HJPC) to initiate the dismissal procedure against the head of this institution Milan Tegeltija for attending the meeting of RS entity officials working in state institutions to discuss further steps on blocking the state's decision-making process.
“Tegeltija's lost all credibility after participating in Dodik's meeting whose aim was to undermine Bosnia's Constitutional order. It's unacceptable that a man under the control of the SNSD is heading the HJPC,” Izetbegovic said.
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Last Wednesday, the RS leadership announced they would not take part in the decision-making process at the state level. The whole thing began after several Bosniak MPs in the RS parliament filed an appeal to the Constitutional Court against the RS Law on Agricultural Land and the RS Law on Inland Navigation, stating that the RS is usurping state competencies and taking the land which belongs to the state.
The RS authorities’ demand that foreign judges which are now an integral part of the Court to be excluded from it, only leaving the local judges, only then will they start participating in the government's decision-making process.
Bosniak leaders are against this proposal because they believe that judges will not be impartial when dealing with cases threatening the vital national interests of constituent peoples.
Izetbegovic called on the Prosecution and Chief Prosecutor Gordana Tadic “to finally start doing their job and sanction those undermining the Constitutional Order.
Speaking about Dodik's invitation to speak with him on the current situation in the country as soon as possible, Izetbegovic said:
“There will be no talks until the blockade is over. There are no talks while there's a gun to our head. We came out of one crisis and entered another all because of Dodik. Some new Dayton Peace Agreement or a Dayton 2 is not possible, but if the crisis and these one-sided conditions continue we'd have our own demands, like the discontent with entity voting and the status if Srebrenica.”
Asked if the current crisis would have economic and social consequences for the country, the SDA leader said that RS residents would suffer the most.
Following the signing of the Dayton Peace Agreement which ended the 1992-1995 war in Bosnia, the country was subdivided into two semi-autonomous entities – the Bosniak-Croat shared Federation and the Serb-dominated Republika Srpska. Each entity has its own competencies and parliaments and each entity makes its own laws which must be in line with the state Constitution.
