OHR HAS CREATED AN ANTI-DAYTON, UNCONSTITUTIONAL BiH

DERVENTA, November 15 /SRNA/ - Professor of constitutional law Siniša Karan stated today that the Office of the High Representative /OHR/ has created an anti-Dayton, unconstitutional BiH to which the three constituent peoples never gave their consent, and that the OHR is now facing the problem of how to make such a structure legal.

"The BiH Constitution clearly defined the only possible framework for multiethnic states of this kind – a federal framework - and it defined the rights of all three peoples. The essence of those rights is that no nation may impose its will on another," Karan said. He added that, three decades later, the OHR - operating on anti-Dayton foundations - has imposed 913 decisions and 166 laws that exclusively transferred competencies from the entities, specifically from Republika Srpska, to the BiH level, as well as 122 amendments to the entity constitution. According to Karan, 30 years after the signing of Dayton, the result is a completely new, anti-Dayton, unconstitutional BiH - one that lacks the consent of the three constituent peoples. "And then they faced a problem: how to make this legal? They tried countless times through constitutional reforms to insert into the Constitution what is unconstitutional," he explained. He emphasized that these attempts failed, after which the OHR and its supporters began using joint institutions - primarily the Constitutional Court - whose task is solely to protect Annex 4, the Dayton Constitution. In that way, Karan said, they sought to create a new constitution and a new constitutional order, attempting to legalize something that has no basis in the existing Constitution. "That is impossible. We are fighting against it, and for us all their decisions, all the competencies they seized, all those unfortunate amendments they imposed, all those laws - remain unconstitutional, because the Constitution does not recognize them," Karan stressed. He added that Annex 4, the Constitution, has formally been changed only once - with Amendment I, which incorporated the final decision on the Brčko District - which he said remains unconstitutional, illegal, and illegitimate.