Draft Law on Prevention and Combating Corruption of Sarajevo Canton to be in the Assembly in Early 2022

SARAJEVO, (Patria) - KS Minister of Justice and Administration Darja Softić-Kadenić confirmed today that this ministry is intensively working on the preparation of the Law on Prevention and Combating Corruption in KS, which will consolidate the draft law on preventing nepotism and party employment adopted in April 2021.

"This is a package that should consolidate the issue of conflict of interest, the issue of protecting whistleblowers, and the issue of strengthening the integrity of institutional bodies. This package is a demanding regulation because we already have regulations in force on the wider BiH scene that regulate this issue in a superficial way. They exist only to be adopted, and they are completely inapplicable because the appropriate accompanying mechanisms have not been created, or these mechanisms do not meet the standards and measures that would be needed to deal with these very important issues, because conflict of interest is precisely what hides a huge space for corruption, because conflict of interest includes everything that leads to a person in a position to make decisions not making those decisions impartially and professionally, but making them under personal influence in their own interest, not in the public interest," said the minister.

She adds that the mechanisms for detecting and resolving conflicts of interest must be measured and regulated in a way that achieves high international principles and standards, and thus implements the recommendations and principles as one of the 14 priorities of the European Commission.

"This is a project on which the Ministry is closely cooperating with representatives of the international community, and efforts are being made to create a text that will be realistic, applicable, and implementable in practice. The intention is for this draft to be presented at the first sessions of the Assembly in 2022," she added.

Regarding the status of the KS Office for Combating Corruption and Quality Management, Softić-Kadenić said that the institutional position of the Office for Combating Corruption is a complex issue.

"The maximum independence of the Office and the maximum apolitical nature of the head and other employees in the Office must be ensured, and the solution currently chosen, which is the Professional Service of the Government, allows for a civil servant who enjoys job security to be at its head, who is not an appointed person who is not appointed and dismissed by politicians, is something that is closest to that standard of independence and apolitical nature. This Professional Service was established by Decree, and this segment of the institutional repositioning of the Office itself is something we are considering, but it will not be part of this draft law that we are preparing, nor will it be opened as a chapter during 2022," concluded Softi-Kadenić.