06/09/2013 Monitoring
Strasbourg, 06.09.2013 – The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) should ask the Council’s executive body, the Committee of Ministers, to consider suspending Bosnia and Herzegovina from its right of representation in the organisation if it does not make “substantial progress” in implementing the Sejdić and Finci judgment of the European Court of Human Rights, and other outstanding obligations and commitments, before the October 2014 elections, according to the Assembly’s Monitoring Committee.
In a draft resolution approved unanimously today in Paris, based on a report by Karin S. Woldseth (Norway, EDG) and Egidijus Vareikis (Lithuania, EPP/CD), the committee also said it would consider imposing sanctions against Bosnia and Herzegovina’s PACE delegation if the judgment is not implemented in good time, ending discrimination in elections to the Presidency and House of Peoples.
“The Assembly will not tolerate yet another election in blatant violation of the Sejdić and Finci judgment,” the parliamentarians declared.
They said implementing the judgment was “a first step in the comprehensive constitutional reform that is needed in order to move away from the institutional straightjacket created by the Dayton Constitution, towards a modern, euro-compatible and functional democracy in which every citizen, regardless of his or her ethnic affiliation, enjoys the same rights and freedoms.”