Taking Bosnia’s Constitution to Court – an Unfinished Fight

"Ethnicity should not be a constitutional category," she adds. "I won't identify with any of these groups out of principle."

A federation of six republics, the former Yugoslavia brought together Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Bosniaks, Macedonians Montenegrins and others under one socialist union, but it fell apart in a series of brutal wars in the 1990s.

Bosnia's current constitution is a part of the Dayton Peace Agreement that ended the country's 1992-95 inter-ethnic war, which claimed some 100,000 lives.

The agreement stopped the bloodshed. But it also divided power between the nationalist elites who had pursued the war, and turned citizens who belonged to minority ethnic groups, or rejected ethnic nationalism, into second-class citizens.

The constitution states that candidates for the three-person national presidency and the upper chamber of the national parliament must identify as ethnic Serbs, Croats or Bosniaks. The presidency and the upper chamber must be divided equally among the three groups. All others are excluded.

In 2002, after Zornic was told she could not run for the parliament because she identified as a "citizen of Bosnia," she went to court.

Years later, in 2014, her case reached the European Court of Human Rights, ECHR, which ruled that Bosnia's constitution was violating her human rights and discriminating against anyone who did not belong to one of the constituent groups.

Since that verdict, the ECHR and other bodies have warned Bosnia that failure to implement the verdict by amending its constitution would be a stumbling block on its path towards joining the EU.

"I never had the intention of becoming President," Zornic says. "I just want to draw attention to the injustice; that is my goal here."

...

Continue reading on: