Bosnia MP Challenged Over Change in Ethnic Status
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| Goran Opsenica Photo courtesy of N1 |
While Bosnia awaits the formation of governments at entity and state level, an attempt by a new MP to change his ethnic status has highlighted a strange loophole in Bosnian law and politics.
Goran Opsenica, newly elected as an MP in the Federation entity’s House of Representatives for the main Bosnian Croat party, Croatian Democratic Union, HDZ, will be serving as an entity MP for the next four years – as a Serb.
Opsenica was formally given his mandate on Tuesday in Sarajevo. The formation of a government in Bosnia’s Federation entity is yet to be completed in the coming period.
The formally non-ethnic Social Democratic Party, SDP, has announced it will file a criminal complaint, as it claims Opsenica’s declaration as a Serb was not lawful.
“We want an investigation to see how it was possible for him to get a seat reserved for Serbs, although he publicly says he is a Croat,” Irfan Cengic, general secretary of the SDP, said in a statement on Tuesday.
Opsenica is not the first politician in the multi-ethnic country to expore this anomaly, which is blamed on the country’s complex system of ethnic quotas.
There are three constituent ethnic groups in Bosnia: Bosniak, Bosnian Croat and Serb, while those who do not identify with these may identify as “Others”.
Under the constitution, ethnic quotas operate at many levels. The three-member state presidency, for example, must comprise a Serb, a Bosniak and a Croat.
Ethnic quotas also apply to seats in the Federation entity’s House of Representatives, and to seats in the House of Peoples and Council of Peoples in the other entity, Republika Srpska.
Bosnia’s election commission says that, by law, politicians may not change their national affiliation within the same four-year electoral cycle.
This is why the country’s state court ruled in October that Nina Bukejlovic, a candidate for a seat in the Republika Srpska assembly, could not take a seat as a Bosniak since she declared her ethnicity as Serbian in the local elections in 2016. She must, therefore, remain a Serb at least until 2020.
Experts say lawmakers who declare a different ethnicity are trying to benefit from situations when there are not enough candidates from a certain ethnic group to fill its set quota in a legislature.
The European Court of Human Rights has ruled repeatedly that Bosnia’s constitution violates human rights laws by discriminating against minorities such as Jews, Roma and others, because of the ethnic quota system.
However, wrangling between the three communities has prevented them from agreeing to make changes.
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