Irma Baralija sues Bosnia and Herzegovina because elections are not held in Mostar

MOSTAR, (Patria) - Mostar resident Irma Baralija has sued the state of Bosnia and Herzegovina with the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg due to the failure to hold local elections in Mostar.  

This professor of philosophy and sociology, and a Master of Political Science, told Patria that she and her lawyer Dženana Hadžiomerović filed the lawsuit in June, and they recently received official confirmation from the Court that the case will be considered. 

“Bosnia and Herzegovina is a signatory to the Convention on Human Rights and the famous Protocol 12. Protocol of that convention states that any form of discrimination is prohibited. In the case of the citizens of Mostar, we are discriminated against based on the principle of residence. Therefore, all those who reside in Mostar could not participate in the local elections in either 2012 or 2016. This is discrimination. The state, the BiH Parliament, has done nothing to rectify these irregularities,” said Baralija.

“The main goal is to put pressure on the authorities and for the people of Mostar to finally have elections,” she added.

Local elections in Mostar were last held in 2008. 

A special Annex to the Dayton Peace Agreement concerns the City of Mostar. It definitively established the political future of the city on the Neretva River - defining it as a whole and unified entity, with the territory it had before the 1991 war, and with a common city administration, organized through six multi-ethnic municipalities.

The then international administrator of Mostar, German Hans Koschnick, enacted the Transitional Statute of the City in 1996. With this statute, Mostar was divided into six municipalities – three majority-Croat and three majority-Bosniak. The goal was to take the first step towards overcoming the division of Mostar into the western, majority-Croat part, and the eastern, majority-Bosniak part. Eight years later, in 2004, the British High Representative Paddy Ashdown imposed a new Statute. With it, he re-established one municipality, and turned the ethnic municipalities into electoral units, thus giving Mostar special electoral rules, incorporated into the Election Law of BiH. These rules aimed to prevent ethnic overvoting and the recognition of the results of ethnic cleansing committed during the war in BiH. At that time, Croatian parties complained to the Constitutional Court of BiH that this violated the rights of Croats, meaning that one Bosniak vote in Mostar was worth several Croatian votes, as some of the Bosniak municipalities had only a few thousand voters, while at the same time, just one of the Croatian municipalities had more than 20,000 inhabitants, and such a municipality could not provide the same number of councilors to the City Council of Mostar as some smaller municipalities. Following the decision of the Constitutional Court of BiH made at the end of 2010, which accepted this argument of the Croatian parties, the question arose as to which electoral rules should be used to conduct local elections in Mostar.

The Constitutional Court of BiH then ordered the Parliamentary Assembly of BiH to amend the Election Law of BiH. The City Council was ordered to harmonize the City Statute with the Constitution of BiH. From then until today, nothing has changed. Local elections in Mostar were last held in 2008. Currently, there is no City Council, and all power is in the hands of Mayor Ljubo Bešlić, who is a member of HDZ BiH, as are some officials from SDA.