Seven representatives in the Council of Peoples of Bosnia’s Republika Srpska (RS) entity filed an appeal requesting that the BiH Constitutional Court reviews whether the Law on Forests, passed in RS in 2020, is in line with the constitution, arguing that it is harmful to Bosnia and Herzegovina.

According to one of the signatories of the request, Alija Tabakovic, Bosnia’s two semi-autonomous entities are obliged to harmonize all their laws with the BiH Constitution when adopting them.

“We have the Decision of the Constitutional Court of BiH from 2019, where it is clearly defined that issues regarding the laws on state property must be resolved at the state level,” he explained.

He said that, with this law, the RS registered state property as its own, “which is contrary to the decision on the disposal of state property.”
Tabakovic said he expects the Constitutional Court to act on the matter and annul the problematic parts of the law and that the issue will be discussed in the BiH Parliament in the future.

Another one of the signatories, Senad Bratic, reminded that in 2012, the Constitutional Court of BiH assessed that the Law on the Status of State Property Located on the Territory of RS is also disputable because BiH has the exclusive right to regulate the issue of this property.