In August, the former Agriculture Minister Christian Schmidt (CSU) takes up his new post as High Representative of the international community in Bosnia-Hercegovina.

The authority he is supposed to head, the "Office of the High Representative" (OHR), was created after the end of the Bosnian War in 1995 to oversee the physical and institutional reconstruction of the Balkan state.

For its part, the OHR is overseen by a “Peace Implementation Council”, which is sent by more than 50 states and international organizations.

But after more than 25 years of peace in Bosnia there are increasing questions about the raison d'être of an authority whose role is described by some actors and organizations as superfluous or even counterproductive at best.

Michael Martens

Correspondent for Southeast European countries based in Vienna.

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They include the organization Transparency International (TI), which is committed to the fight against corruption. Srdjan Blagovcanin, chairman of TI-Bosnia, describes the OHR as an authority that is meaningless not only in the fight against corruption: “Today, the OHR's ​​activities are limited to reporting to the UN Security Council every six months and to the meetings of the Peace Implementation Council to participate. Then concern about the situation of the country is expressed, and that is all. ”Blagovcanin in no way denies the historic merits of the OHR in the first post-war years:“ At the end of the 1990s and at the beginning of the new millennium, the OHR gained through the creation of a state Judicial system and the enforcement of laws at the state level established the institutional framework for the fight against corruption. "

Fertile soil for corruption

After the end of the war, the OHR played an important role “when it came to enforcing a peace treaty and establishing elementary state functions”.

Even then, however, the picture was not only positive: “The unrestricted power of the OHR was also fertile ground for corruption within the OHR itself. Our first report in Bosnia 20 years ago was about corruption in international structures.

As a result, we saw ourselves exposed to considerable pressure from the OHR. ”An inextricable contradiction is that the High Representative should support the democratization of Bosnia, but as an official appointed from abroad, he himself has no democratic legitimacy.

"It doesn't make much sense to talk about transparency in a deeply undemocratic institution like the OHR," said Blagovcanin. It is wrong to blame the OHR with the main responsibility for corruption in Bosnia. But the question arises as to the shared responsibility of an authority that has been or should at least be responsible for supervision in the country as the highest body for decades.

At the heart of the debate about the OHR are the “Bonn powers”. These are powers removed from any democratic control, with which high representatives in Bosnia can pass laws, repeal or dismiss officials like the allies in Germany before 1949. Until July 23, when the outgoing High Representative Valentin Inzko decreed the denial of the genocide in Criminal law on Srebrenica had not been exercised in a decade. Serious doubts remain as to whether a decree issued on recourse to Bonn's powers can still be practically enforced in Bosnia today. 

However, Blagovcanin is fundamentally bothered by the powers: "The position of Transparency International in Bosnia is that the Bonn powers should be abolished immediately and unconditionally and the OHR should be closed." The Venice Commission, a body of legal experts that the Council of Europe advises, of which Bosnia is a member, had already pointed out in 2005 "that the role and powers of the OHR are not compatible with democratic principles." This also applies because there is no legal action against decrees of the OHR in Bosnia.

To this end, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe stated in a resolution back in 2004 that such extensive powers without any accountability were not in accordance with democratic principles.

Is the continued existence of the OHR harmful?

A quarter of a century after the end of the war, the continued existence of the OHR is therefore not only no longer useful, but even harmful: "The EU itself has repeatedly emphasized that the existence of the OHR is incompatible with the process of EU integration sought by Bosnia." EU General Affairs Council concluded in 2009 that the Bosnian application for EU membership could not be examined while the OHR still existed.

"This is one of the reasons why the existence of the OHR and the Bonn powers in Bosnia today are in every respect part of the problem, not the solution," claims Blagovcanin, pointing out that through the Peace Implementation Council, which also includes states like Russia and Saudi Arabia, Powers have a say in Bosnia, for whom it is perfectly convenient for the country to stagnate and not move any closer to the EU. If he, as a Bosnian, could ask Christian Schmidt or the OHR as an institution, it would be this, says Blagovcanin: “What exactly is it that the OHR has not done for 25 years, but should now do? And until when?

And how does a German explain to the citizens of a democratic state like Germany that he is taking on a function in another European country that is not subject to any democratic control? ”Without answers to such questions, Transparency International can only do what it is known for elsewhere: Watch the elected powerful on the fingers - and the unelected even more so.