High Representative to BiH Valentin Inzko, on Friday, June 10, announced a decree lifting bans on public employment and political activity that had been imposed against 58 citizens of Republika Srpska without any form of due process. Between 2003 and 2008, the High Representative had summarily removed these 58 individuals and others from their public positions and banned them from public employment or political activity. The High Representative’s new order does not admit fault with respect to the bans or compensate the banned individuals. Inzko’s June 10 decision states that with the arrest and extradition of Ratko Mladic, “the conditions to repeal the bans have been met.”
Since 1998, the High Representative has summarily banned nearly 200 BiH citizens from public employment and political activity, and it continues to assert the power to decree such bans. The individuals punished by these decrees are given no hearing or appeal and no opportunity to contest the claimed reasons for the sanctions. Many of the bans remain in place, and, to this day, none of the banned individuals has received a hearing.
Most of the 58 individuals whose bans were lifted on Friday had been banned from public life based on extraordinarily vague, boilerplate allegations that they were indirectly involved in a system under which war crimes suspects were not apprehended. For example, many of the decrees under which these 58 individuals were banned were based on the unproven allegation that, “[a]s a constituent of the current political culture within Republika Srpska,” they were “derivatively culpable for contributing to the institutional failure to purge from the political landscape of conditions conducive to the provision of material support and sustenance to [indicted] individuals . . . .”
Inzko also issued a notice of the termination of the application of earlier decrees blocking the bank accounts of 34 BiH citizens. These individuals’ bank accounts had been blocked without any hearing or appeal. In addition, Inzko repealed a 2004 decree with which the High Representative froze bank accounts in the name of the SDS Party.
