Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik has vowed to ignore a summons from the country’s federal prosecutor who is investigating him for “undermining the constitutional order.”
“I will not go to their political court, because Serbs no longer submit to inquisitions!” Dodik said on Thursday, March 6th.
The political spat comes after Dodik signed laws on Wednesday that ban Bosnia and Herzegovina’s central state judiciary and police from the autonomous Serb region, known as Republika Srpska.
The 65-year-old nationalist politician has been pursuing a separatist agenda for many years. He has suggested that Bosnian Serbs should unite with neighbouring Serbia.
Bosnia and Herzegovina is a fragile and highly ungovernable state which has consisted of two autonomous halves since the end of the Bosnian civil war in 1995: Republika Srpska, a Serbian-dominated entity, and the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, a Muslim-Croat territory. (A third, much smaller administrative unit also exists under the name of Brčko District.)
The two are linked by weak central institutions, while each has its own government and parliament.
Dodik has regularly called Bosnia a “failed state” and a Western “experiment” that “does not work.”
The Bosnian Serb parliament has for the past few years been engaged in legal warfare with Bosnia’s so-called High Representative, Christian Schmidt, who oversees the implementation of the Dayton peace deal that put an end to the civil war.
In 2023, the parliament voted to suspend rulings by the constitutional court of Bosnia and to ignore the High Representative’s decrees and laws. Last year, Dodik was put on trial for defying Schmidt’s decisions. Dodik called it a “political trial” intended to “eliminate him from the political arena.”
Last week, he was sentenced to one year imprisonment and was also banned from performing his duties as president of Republika Srpska for six years.
The new laws signed on Wednesday by Dodik target the federal prosecutor’s office that indicted him and the federal court that sentenced him. “We want to bring back Republika Srpska to us, this is our right,” Dodik said.
Several Bosnian Muslim political leaders slammed the move as a “coup d’etat,” and Bosnian foreign minister Elmedin Konaković said a complaint would be submitted to the constitutional court.
Both the European Union and the United States voiced their concerns, saying Dodik’s moves “question the sovereignty, unity and territorial integrity” of Bosnia.
However, Dodik maintains that the federal judiciary, prosecutors, and police are not constitutional because they were not envisaged in the Dayton Peace Accords.
“Republika Srpska is not and never will be anyone’s colony!” he warned in a tweet on his X account.
Правни бесмисао БиХ најбоље се огледа у чињеници да о Уставу говори вануставна институција.
Тужилаштво БиХ ме позива да сутра дам изјаву као осумњичени за рушење уставног поретка, само зато што сам извршио своју Уставом и законом прописану дужност након одлука Народне скупштине…
— Милорад Додик (@MiloradDodik) March 6, 2025
The Bosnian Serb leader has received the backing of both Serbian president Aleksandar Vučić and Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, with the latter calling the verdict against Dodik a “sad example” of the weaponization of the judiciary against a democratically elected leader.
