Bosnia MPs Challenge Excise Law in Court

A group of MPs on Thursday filed a motion to Bosnia's Constitutional Court against the excise law adopted in December, which they say was passed in an unconstitutional procedure and with different versions of the law in Bosniak, Croatian and Serbian.

All bills passed by Bosnia's parliament must be printed in the three languages of the country's main communities - Serbs, Croats and Bosniaks.

"I hope the Constitutional Court will rule in our favour since from the beginning we did not want this law adopted in urgent procedure, without a public debate," Sasa Magazinovic, an MP from the opposition Social Democratic Party, told BIRN.

The MPs that voted against the law say parliament's House of Peoples, its upper chamber, cannot propose the procedure on which the House of Representatives, the lower chamber, adopt the law - which was originally proposed by the Council of Ministers, the government. They say this procedure is against the constitution.

The excise law, adopted in mid-December, after almost a year of the negotiations, long debates in parliament and amid resistance from opposition parties, came into force at the beginning of January. The latest initiative might postpone it, however.

Another problem is that the three versions of the law, in Bosnia's three official languages, are not the same.

"All laws must be identical in all three versions and here we have situation that in the Bosnian and Croatians version, there is special account while in the Serbian version that account is not mentioned," Aleksandra Pandurevic, an MP from the Serbian Democratic Party, SDS, said.

The SDS is part of the ruling coalition at state level but is the main opposition party in Bosnia's Serb-dominated entity, Republika Srpska.

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