Decisions of the Badinter Commission Have the Force of International Verdicts

Today, the Belgrade media featured a headline: "His forehead is their image and likeness: On this day, Alija's bazaar riffraff started a bloody war". The horrifying attitude towards a legal international legal act continues. The constant denial of March 1st, the Day of Independence of BiH, has long become meaningless. Today in BiH, everyone is talking about war and the defense of this country's sovereignty from a bloody aggression. The legal background of the Referendum for independence and March 1st is hardly addressed.

The Serbian side persistently claims that BiH did not have the right to a referendum for independence, which is an absurdity. The Constitution defined the Socialist Republic of BiH as a "sovereign state of equal citizens, the peoples of Bosnia and Herzegovina - Muslims, Serbs and Croats, and members of other peoples and minorities living in it".

Ivanić and Dodik on the principle of connected vessels

Few people today remember the international arbitration commission, called the Badinter Commission, although this commission is still relevant today. Its chairman was Robert Badinter, a French university law professor and well-known political activist. The members of this commission were all presidents of the constitutional courts of the founding states of the European Union. The Badinter Commission was formed to regulate the legal basis of what was beginning to happen between the republics of the former Yugoslavia. The arbitration of the Badinter Commission had and has the force of international verdicts.

Therefore, the Commission supervised and confirmed all referendums in the then Yugoslavia, from the Slovenian, Croatian, Macedonian, to the Bosnian-Herzegovinian one. Today, Mladen Ivanić, the head of state of BiH, also denies the legal facts of the Referendum. Bosnia and Herzegovina followed the recipe of the Badinter Commission, just as other republics of the former Yugoslavia did. Ivanić thereby indirectly denies all referendums held in the republics of ex-Yugoslavia. If anyone in the region cared about the opinion of a member of the Presidency of BiH, it would be a diplomatic scandal. Thus, even when a member of the Presidency of BiH denies international legal facts about their own country, it only confirms the usual behavior of the political leaders of Bosnian Serbs. The leaders of Bosnian Serbs produce views on the principle of connected vessels. If Milorad Dodik holds a referendum bank, then Ivanić must at least be against the one from 1992.

For the referendums of 1991 and 1992, the Badinter Commission posed a question that requires an answer based on the principles of public international law, which defines the conditions under which states will be constituted. A state is defined as a community that includes territory and population subject to organized political authority. Such a state is characterized as sovereign. The Badinter Commission regulated everything. Precisely because of this, unfortunately, none of the then most respected European jurists and presidents of the constitutional courts of the European Union countries anticipated the bloody war that would follow against Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Bosnia and Herzegovina lives its own life

When Bosnia and Herzegovina fulfilled all the conditions of the European Union in 1992, on January 15, the report of the Badinter Arbitration Commission was published, in which the constitution of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina as a sovereign and independent state was conditioned solely by a referendum of its citizens. In accordance with the Constitution and the two-thirds will of its citizens, the Assembly of the Socialist Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina passed a Decision on calling a referendum on the future status of the Republic on January 26.

A bloody war was waged to change the essence of the Referendum results and to erase an international democratic act as a legal and historical fact through total war destruction. Today, this international legal act is again being attempted to be redefined and presented in some new form through constant denial, boycotts of its functions, and secession announcements. Therefore, those who are making this country dysfunctional, irrational, and unequal are the same ones who point fingers "to the world and the people" at the problems they are creating for it.

Bosnia and Herzegovina has a bloody aggression behind it, with hundreds of thousands of dead. Its historical statehood is already a thousand years old. What is forgotten is that its legal continuity is the oldest among all Balkan states. Bosnia and Herzegovina has judgments from the International Court of Justice and the Hague Tribunal behind it, where facts about the crime of genocide, crimes against humanity, and ethnic cleansing have been proven as attempts to destroy it and forcibly change its international legal status. These are, therefore, facts that confirm that an attempt was made to change its international sovereignty through armed force and internal destruction.

Bosnia and Herzegovina has long been living its own life, despite all these unbalanced policies that seek to change its international legal subjectivity through new internal threats. In fact, this is primarily done by the political elite in RS, keeping their own people in a kind of irrational state and fictions, while constantly blackmailing all other citizens.

As if the daily political denial of BiH's sovereignty means anything more than their own embarrassment. On the international stage. (os)