Bosnian Serbs Put Referendum Decision on Ice

The parliament in Bosnia's Serb-majority entity, Republika Srpska, will hold a special session on Monday on shelving an earlier decision to hold a referendum on the powers of Bosnia's state-level judiciary.

The initiative to suspend the decision on the referendum on the powers of the Court and the Prosecutor's Office of Bosnia and Herzegovina comes from the ruling coalition, led by the Alliance of the Independent Social Democrats, SNSD - the same group that launched the initiative to hold the referendum more than two years ago.

In a statement, the ruling coalition blamed the opposition for the collapse of the initiative, stating that «since the opposition has withheld support for the decision to hold a referendum in the RS on the Court and the Prosecutor's Office of BiH, that decision should be temporarily withdrawn until a consensus is reached».

Until then, it added, the coalition supported a new initiative to organize a petition containing a question that is identical to the referendum question, and obtain at least 500,000 signatures for it.

The decision to suspend the controversial referendum, which both the country's Bosniak politicians and the international community opposed, comes less than two weeks before the deadline for its implementation was due to expire.

The move was expected after Milorad Dodik, the RS President and the leader of the SNSD, on September 19 announced an intention to suspend the call for a referendum.

The ruling majority in the RS assembly passed a decision to call a referendum in July 2015.

However, it was not published in the Official Gazette of the RS until September 20 this year, drawing criticism from opposition parties who claimed that Dodik had manipulated the issue to gain support in...