By EUDO-CITIZENSHIP co-director Jo Shaw.
The failure of Bosnia-Herzegovina’s law-makers to adopt legislation to replace a law annulled by the Constitutional Court in 2011, which makes provision for the registration of new born babies, has highlighted many of the contradictions within Bosnian politics. While the political elites of the two ethnically-based entities (Federation of Bosnia-Herzegovina and Republika Srpska) established by the Dayton settlement which stopped the war in Bosnia have blamed each other, protests in Sarajevo and elsewhere in the country, including in the ethnically Serb dominated capital of the RS Banja Luka have seen people from across Bosnia come together to protest at the manifold failures of their lawmakers and political elites.
The role of citizenship in this is more than symbolic, as a common national citizenship is one of the few things that all Bosnians have in common. As many have commented, not only do the lawmakers’ failures make it hard for newborn babies to be full citizens (and thus able to access necessary facilities such as healthcare or passports), but they also continue to combine to make it impossible for some citizens to be full political citizens in Bosnia, because of the failure to implement the Sejdic and Finci judgment of the European Court of Human Rights from December 2009. The irony of this particular case is that the inability to register new born babies, and to obtain for them a Personal Identification Number, which is essential to all aspects of legal personhood in Bosnia, has been merely a side effect of a quarrel between the ethnic elites brought before the Constitutional Court, about the naming of municipalities.
Newspaper reports have stressed how these protests about what many citizens obviously see as an elite driven ethnic divide could be a turning point for post-Dayton Bosnia. While the Dayton-imposed constitution, with its ethnically prescribed entities and divisions, was necessary to stop the fighting, its ossification of the Bosnian body politic is now seen as part of the problem, preventing this country from moving forward politically and economically.
Read a commentary in Open Democracy by Igor Stiks on the protests and the links to citizenship.
Read an appeal put out by academics across Bosnia for common action to force politicians to pay account to citizens’ wishes.
For more background on citizenship in Bosnia-Herzegovina read the country report by EUDO Citizenship expert Eldar Sarajlic.