ALL ACTIONS TAKEN BY HIGH REPRESENTATIVES BEYOND THEIR MANDATE SHOULD BE ANNULLED

BANJA LUKA, AUGUST 7 /SRNA/ - The time has come for a legal challenge to annul everything that the High Representatives in BiH have done beyond their mandate under Annex 10 of the Dayton Peace Agreement, lawyer Slavko Mitrović said.

"Everything should be annulled, as demanded by both the SNSD and the HDZ, and increasingly by the global academic and political community as well. The Constitutional Affairs Committee of the National Assembly of Republika Srpska concluded that Srpska will, in the coming period, insist on the annulment of all decisions by the High Representative in BiH for which there was no prior consent from the Republic," Mitrović said.

According to him, instead of allowing the Dayton Agreement to enter into force, the "international community" imposed a protectorate and occupation, and violated international law, the UN Charter, and human rights conventions, with the perpetrators of this "joint criminal enterprise" being unlawful groups of self-appointed states and organisations.

Mitrović said these include the long-defunct Peace Implementation Council /PIC/ and its Steering Board, as well as the "High Representative of the international community" and their supporters installed in the Constitutional Court of BiH, where three foreign judges together with two Bosniak judges regularly uphold all the unlawful acts of the joint criminal enterprise.

He added that there is also a "higher level" - the EU and the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.

"In BiH, the term 'international community' has, for many people, and completely so among political Sarajevo, the status of a golden calf, a false idol, an unquestionable authority that cannot, and even worse, must not be challenged," Mitrović wrote for Glas Srpske.

He concluded that, based on what the "international community" has done in BiH over the past 30 years, it represents a failed "in vivo" experiment.

"It was the maintenance of chaos of varying intensity, with no intention of ever allowing that territory to become a state in the legal-theoretical and civilisational sense," Mitrović said.

He pointed out that the biggest deception was the so-called Bonn Powers, which are not actually such, because no such thing exists in the conclusions of the PIC Conference held in Bonn on December 9, 1997.

Mitrović recalled that one point of the conclusions clearly states that the PIC "welcomes the intention of the High Representative to use his final authority," but that no interpretation can transform "welcoming an intention" into authorisation to impose laws.

"The wording 'welcoming an intention' cannot, under any interpretation, be called 'granting authority'. However, through daily media bombardments, threats, deceptions, fraud and blackmail, a myth was created that they called the 'Bonn Powers'," Mitrović stressed.

Mitrović recalled that former British ambassador to BiH Charles Crawford, who was one of the creators of this concept, also said that the "Bonn Powers" had no real legal basis whatsoever, that they amounted to a bluff within the framework of an international political power game, which subsequent High Representatives dressed up in legal language to make the whole matter appear superior and inevitable.