Bosnia’s Foreign Minister Bisera Turkovic called on US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and other world leaders to stop High Representative Christian Schmidt’s intervention regarding the country’s Electoral Law, stating that the imposition of those changes is helping the Croat Democratic Union (HDZ BiH), calling this party extreme right.

Your Excellency, I am writing to bring to your attention, with the United States government being a guarantor of the Dayton Accords, the current highly disputed electoral reform proposal favoured by a far-right Bosnian Croat political party, the Croat Democratic Union (HDZ), that goes against the core democratic value of free and fair elections. The enactment of such a proposal would further discriminate against Jews, Roma and other minorities from not being able to hold top-level representation in Bosnia and Herzegovina and would cement the current discriminatory system towards minorities in my country,” the Minister said.

She claims that the proposed law seeks to gerrymander the Bosnian election districts to over-represent the Bosnian Croat voters of the HDZ BiH in the House of Peoples – the upper chamber of the Bosnian Parliament.

“This proposal has gained traction in some European capitals by the strong lobbying of the Croatian government, where the HDZ is also in power, and threatens to force the Office of the High Representative in Bosnia to enact the highly disputed electoral reform proposal,” Turkovic noted.

She warned that Any formal endorsement of “such destructive policies threatens our core democratic values for which we paid a heavy price to protect during our independence as a country.”

The letter was also sent to the G7 member states as well as the Peace Implementation Council in BiH consisting of: Albania, Austria, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Canada, China (resigned in May 2000), Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Egypt, Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (now the republics of Serbia and Montenegro), Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Jordan, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Morocco, Netherlands, North Macedonia, Norway, Oman, Pakistan, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russian Federation, Saudi Arabia, Slovak Republic, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, Ukraine, United Kingdom and United States of America; the High Representative, Brcko Arbitration Panel (dissolved in 1999 after the Final Award was issued), Council of Europe, European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), European Commission, International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), International Monetary Fund (IMF), North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), United Nations (UN), UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHCHR), UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), UN Transitional Administration of Eastern Slavonia (UNTAES; disbanded in January 1998) and the World Bank.