Rapporteur Tiny Kox concerned about risk having no Bosnian Members in PACE

Source: http://www.assembly.coe.int

The parliament of Bosnia and Herzegovina has been warned that it has only two days left to submit the names of its delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) – or risk having no Bosnian members in the Assembly for the whole of 2019.

Tiny Kox (Netherlands, UEL) and Serhiy Sobolev (Ukraine, EPP/CD), co-rapporteurs for the monitoring of Bosnia and Herzegovina by PACE, wrote to the Speakers of both houses of the Bosnian Parliamentary Assembly today expressing concern at the “high possibility” that it could miss the statutory deadline of midnight on 6 April 2019.

Under PACE rules, a parliament has six months from the date of an election to submit the names of a new delegation. Bosnia and Herzegovina, as one of the Council of Europe’s 47 member States, is entitled to send a ten-member delegation to the Assembly, but has left empty seats since January 2019.

The co-rapporteurs wrote that they were “well aware of the political context in Bosnia and Herzegovina” and the fact that negotiations to form a government at State level could have an impact on the appointment of a Bosnian parliamentary delegation.

However, they added, “the absence of a Bosnian parliamentary delegation to the Assembly is a very bad signal on the ability of your country to honour its commitments in the fields of democracy, the rule of law and human rights”.

They concluded: “Dialogue is one of the core values of the Assembly, but it cannot cultivate it alone.”