The Court That Sits Above the Entities

The one institution both entities cannot simply ignore — and why its bench looks unlike any other court in the region.

How the Court Is Built and What It Decides

The Constitutional Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina sits in Sarajevo as the final arbiter of the country's foundational law. Its authority flows directly from the Dayton Agreement, which in 1995 embedded a constitution inside its Annex 4 and created this court to enforce it. No entity court, no parliament, no minister can override its rulings.

The bench has nine judges. Four are selected by the House of Representatives of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, two by the Assembly of Republika Srpska. The remaining three are appointed by the President of the European Court of Human Rights — and crucially, those three may not be citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina or any neighbouring state. This arrangement was written into Dayton deliberately: a court settling disputes between two entities, and among three constitutionally recognised peoples, needed members with no stake in the outcome. The international judges serve five-year terms and have, in practice, often supplied the deciding vote in close cases.

The court handles three broad categories of dispute. First, it rules on whether legislation passed by the state, the entities, or the cantons within the Federation is compatible with the constitution. Second, it settles jurisdictional conflicts — arguments over which level of government is competent to act on a given matter, which arise with some frequency given the layered division of powers that Dayton produced. Third, it handles appeals from ordinary courts where a party claims a fundamental right has been violated.

Its most consequential ruling came in 2000, in the case known as the "Constituent Peoples" decision. The court found that the then-constitutions of both entities violated the state constitution by effectively treating Bosniaks, Croats and Serbs as second-class citizens outside their respective ethnic majorities — Bosniaks and Croats in Republika Srpska, Serbs in the Federation. The entities were required to amend their constitutions accordingly. Compliance was slow and contested, but the ruling set a precedent: the court's word, once given, cannot simply be legislated away.

What the court cannot do is equally important. It has no enforcement mechanism of its own. It issues decisions; it relies on political will, international pressure and, ultimately, the Dayton framework itself to see them implemented. When rulings are ignored or delayed — and this has happened — the court has no bailiff to send. That gap between legal authority and practical effect is the central tension in the institution's life, and it mirrors the broader tension in a state whose constitutional architecture was designed to end a war before anyone had settled how the peace would be governed.