Bosnian Leader Stalls On European Human Rights Ruling

The Bosnian government cannot implement a European Court of Human Rights ruling in the controversial Sejdic and Finci case before this year's general election in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the President of the Croatian Democratic Union, Dragan Covic, has said.



Covic also criticized the EU on Thursday for failing to accept Bosnia and Herzegovina's affiliation to the EU over his government's failure to comply with the 2009 ruling.



The case, often referred to as the "Sejdic-Finci question" has burdened Bosnia's leaders for years.



Key positions within the country's tripartite presidency are awarded only to Serbs, Croats and Bosniaks under the auspices of the Dayton Peace Accords which ended the war in 1995.



But Jakob Finci, a representative of the Jewish community in Bosnia, and Bajro Sejdic, from the Roma community, applied jointly in 2006 to the European Court of Human Rights, claiming that they were deemed ineligible to stand for election to the Presidency and the House of Peoples of the Parliamentary Assembly because of their ethnic origins.



The European Court of Human Rights ruled three years later that they had been discriminated against.



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