Accession to the Council of Europe and 2005 Venice Commission Opinion Bosnia and Herzegovina became a member of the
Council of Europe on 24 April 2002, thus committing to honour the obligations of membership stemming from Article 3 of the
Statute of the Council of Europe, as well as the specific commitments listed in the
Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) Opinion 234 (2002) on Bosnia and Herzegovina's application for membership, including the need to strengthen State institutions in relation to the entities, and to align the text of the Constitution to the
Constitutional Court's decision on the "constituent peoples" case (U-5/98). It concluded that the Bonn Powers, although beneficial in the wake of the
Bosnian War, do "not correspond to democratic principles when exercised without due process and the possibility of judicial control", and called for a "progressive phasing out of these powers and for the establishment of an advisory panel of independent lawyers for the decisions directly affecting the rights of individuals pending the end of the practice." U.S. diplomat
R. Nicholas Burns stated that this would entail moving towards an individual presidency, a stronger prime minister, and a stronger parliament with a stronger speaker; reforms should have been adopted ahead of the
2006 general election. The Prud statement also explicitly called for amendments to be drafted with the expert assistance of international institutions. Dodik also started to further challenge the OHR and call for the repatriation of competences to the entities, relying on the growing support of
Russia.
2009 Butmir process A renewed push for constitutional reforms came in late 2009, in view of the upcoming
Sejdić and Finci ruling of the
European Court of Human Rights and of the
2010 general election, despite diverging views between U.S. and EU actors. Yet, domestic consensus proved elusive, as each of the parties was stuck on maximalist positions. The draft was deemed too centralistic for the SNSD and the HDZ BiH, and not enough for the
Social Democratic Party (SDP BiH) and the SBiH. Only the SDA was explicitly in favour. After two fruitless sessions, the talks were ended right before the European Court of Human Rights issued its
Sejdić and Finci ruling in November 2009. Four subsequent cases also found that the constitution is discriminatory. However, as of 2022, it has yet to be amended.
2010–2012 parliamentary talks was elected to the post of Croat member of the
Bosnian Presidency mostly by Bosniak voters, thus deeming him to be an illegitimate representative of Croat interests. The European Court of Human Rights ruling meant one further narrowing down of the constitutional reform agenda to issues of the European Convention on Human Rights compliance. This also meant finding a solution for the "Croat issue", i.e. the HDZ BiH's grievance following the defeat of
Ivo Miro Jović in the
2006 general election by
Željko Komšić (SDP BiH) thanks to cross-ethnic voting. A Parliamentary committee was tasked to discuss reforms in the spring of 2010, with no results. Election were held in
October 2010, with no changes. Despite the
political stalemate in the formation of a new government, between October 2010 and March 2012, the
Parliament continued talks in the framework of a "Joint Ad Hoc Committee for the Implementation of the judgment of the European Court of Human Rights in the case of
Sejdić and Finci v. Bosnia and Herzegovina", composed of 11 MPs from the House of Representatives and 2 MPs from the House of Peoples, headed by House of Representatives member
Šefik Džaferović. While the committee agreed to add 3 representatives of the "Others" to the national House of Peoples (two elected from the
Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and one from Republika Srpska), no solution was found for the Presidency, with
Bosnian Serbs insisting for direct election of their member, and Bosnian Croats calling for either indirect election or a separate constituency to avoid future
Komšić cases. In March and April 2013, with the support of the Director-General for Enlargement
Stefano Sannino, the EU Delegation in
Sarajevo facilitated a series of direct talks between party leaders, but with no concrete outcome. During the summer of 2013, Čović and Bosnian Presidency member
Bakir Izetbegović reached a political agreement on several files, from
Mostar to Sejdić–Finci, in parallel to the initiative led by the
U.S. Embassy for a constitutional reform of the
Federal entity. An agreement on principles on how to solve the Sejdić–Finci issue was signed by political leaders in Brussels on 1 October 2013, but it evaporated right after. Three further rounds of negotiations among political leaders were led together with Füle, in a castle near
Prague in November 2013, and later in Sarajevo in the first months of 2014, also with the presence of the U.S. and the
Venice Commission. Despite high hopes, a solution could not be found, as the HDZ BiH required the absolute arithmetical certainty of being able to occupy the third seat of the Bosnian Presidency – which, given that the Sejdić–Finci ruling was actually about removing ethnic discrimination in the access to the same Presidency, could not be provided by any possible model. Talks were ended on 17 February 2014, while
popular protests were ongoing in Sarajevo and in the rest of the country. ==Entity-level constitutional reforms ==