The chairman of Bosnia and Herzegovina's tripartite presidency, Zeljko Komsic, announced on Saturday he would continue fighting for his country as a citizens' state, as this was the essence of the rulings by the European Court of Human Rights that found citizens were discriminated against in the election process.

Addressing a convention of his Democratic Front party in Sarajevo, Zeljko Komsic said that those with other ideas were actually trying to achieve a complete ethnic division of the country, which he said must not be allowed.

“We will never stop insisting on the implementation of the judgments by the European Court of Human Rights because their implementation leads to forming a civic state. We are not interested at all in whether someone likes this or not. It was not our idea to reject the constitutiveness of the peoples and establish equality of all citizens, but this was ordered by the European Court of Human Rights. Those who do not like this can complain to that court and not to us who have consistently complied with these standards on which every democratic and civilised society and state is based,” Zeljko Komsic said in his address.

He expressed hope that this idea would draw a critical mass of people who would manage to achieve this goal and thus prevent further divisions.

“There is no alternative to a civic state. The road to it is slow and thorny, but I am confident that we will succeed,” Zeljko Komsic said.

Zeljko Komsic, an ethnic Croat, is treated by the ruling Bosniak-majority Democratic Action Party (SDA) as the key ally in power. Zeljko Komsic's opposition to the principle of the constitutionality of the peoples has been used by SDA leader Bakir Izetbegovic as an argument for his rejection of the proposal by the Croat HDZ BiH party to change the election system by establishing two electoral units within the Bosniak-Croat Federation entity.

The HDZ BiH claims that this is the only way for Croats to elect their own member of the state presidency. They reject Zeljko Komsic as their representative saying that he was elected by a majority of Bosniak votes.

The strongest Croat party insists on the implementation of the Constitutional Court judgment in the Ljubić case, demanding that the constitutiveness of the peoples should be treated as an overarching principle for all expected changes to the constitution and electoral law.