On this day, December 14, 1995, the Dayton Peace Agreement was signed in Paris, which, according to the agreement on November 21 of the same year in Dayton, officially ended the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the United States of America (USA). That document officially ended the almost four-year war, and Bosnia was established as a state of three constituent peoples and others. 

The peace treaty put an end to the four-year bloody conflict and organised Bosnia and Herzegovina as a country of three constituent peoples and others, dividing it into two semi-autonomous entities – the Bosniak-Croat shared Federation (FBiH) and the Serb-majority Republika Srpska (RS).

The main actors of the peace negotiations and the signing of the agreement were late President of what was then called the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Alija Izetbegovic, President of Croatia, Franjo Tudjman, and Serbia, Slobodan Milosevic.

All three states were created by the dissolution of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.

The final agreement was preceded by talks in the Dayton, Ohio, led by then US Secretary of State Warren Christopher and negotiator Richard Holbrooke, with representatives from the European Union. Those who witnessed the signing of the document in Parris included the senior officials of the USA, the UK, Germany, France, Spain and Russia.

In early 2008, it was discovered that the original copy of the Dayton Peace Agreement was lost, and the BiH Parliamentary Assembly requested a new copy, after which France sent a certified copy of that document.

During the past 28 years, there have been several unsuccessful attempts to reform the Dayton Agreement constitutionally, and according to the opinions of many international officials, this agreement has long since been overcome, while politicians in the RS they still believe that the original elements of the Dayton Agreement must continue to be applied.

In addition to stopping the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Dayton brought about a new arrangement of the country and provisions that have been interpreted differently for 28 years and used as the ultimate political means.

The Dayton constitutional arrangement became one of the basic problems in the functioning of modern BiH, as well as an obstacle on its way to Euro-Atlantic integration.

It has become an obstacle to the internal functioning of the state itself and a subject of dispute between political options regarding how BiH should look like a state in the future and what its internal organization should be. In the past years, no consensus was reached on any proposal for constitutional changes. The political gap between political representatives in connection with changes to the constitutional arrangement of BiH was reflected in all spheres of life.