A Constitution of the People and How to Achieve It. Aarif Abraham

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СКАЧАТЬ Bosnia and Herzegovina is referred to throughout as “Bosnia”.

4 The State constitution was agreed as Annex IV of the General Framework Agreement for Peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina, initialled at Dayton on 21 November 1995 and signed in Paris on 14 December 1995. It is referred to throughout as the “Bosnian constitution”.

5 Richard Holbrooke, the principal negotiator of the Agreement, maintains that “on paper, Dayton was a good agreement; it ended the war and established a single, multi-ethnic country.” His caveat is that “the results of the international effort to implement Dayton would determine its true place in history.”

6 There is also the self-governing district of Brčko in the North of Bosnia which is under international supervision.

7 There have been three substantial reform processes since 2005 all of which have failed as a result of intransigent, ethno-nationalist positions taken by the elected representatives. There have also been two missives for reform that are very significant. These are all addressed in Chapter 4.

8 The constitution contravenes international law in a number of ways. For instance, only members of the three main ethnic groups are allowed to run for the office of president; members of the country's many minorities, such as Roma and Jews, are excluded as candidates. Also, individual rights are subservient to ethno-national group rights which permit vetoes, quotas, and exclusive ethno-national representation to the elected representatives of the groups.

9 Approximately 613.22 million USD in 2019 (PIC 2020).

10 The comparison between Bosnia and Britain is not straightforward as the accounting for the cost of government administration is different in the two countries. The figure for Britain is a composite of the following: costs of government administration for the state at 10.1 billion USD, 2019 (HM Treasury 2019); cost of running both Houses of Parliament at 766.25 million USD, 2019 (IfG 2020); cost of the running the central government estate at 3.56 billion USD, 2018 (Cabinet Office 2018); total budgetary receipts 1,054.21 billion USD (OBR 2020). The UK GDP for 2019 was 2,829.10 billion USD (World Bank 2020).

11 This issue is touched upon in Chapter 1 and further elaborated upon in Chapters 3 and 4.

12 This claim in no way relates to policy issues and the very severe crises that emanated over the past 350 years. It also does not discount the violations of rights by the British state, whether domestic or international.

13 The common law, however, does provide that certain statutes that are deemed, by the courts, to have constitutional significance may only be repealed, amended or abrogated if done so expressly by Parliament. This is further discussed in Chapters 4 and 6.

14 This is notwithstanding the fact that it was Conservative politicians who helped pioneer and draft the international instruments that protect fundamental rights including the European Convention on Human Rights (“ECHR”).

15 In leaving the European Union, British citizens lost a host of rights that have not been directly transposed into domestic law, the most significant of which were rights enshrined in the Charter on Fundamental Rights. In respect of the ECHR, it has been a Conservative Party Manifesto commitment, since 2010, to leave the ECHR.

16 See further Ackerman (1991, 1992). Constitution moments are understood to “emerge from an exceptional moment of higher-order law-making under the liberal constitutional paradigm” (Bali and Lerner 2016).

17 This is based on the case study of elite behaviour in the State institutions (Chapters 4 and 5) together with the quantitative analysis (Chapters 2 and 3) demonstrating the scope for accommodation amongst the population at large.

18 See the very cogently argued piece by Bonnie (2001, 801).

19 The incentive structures built into the peace agreement is, unsurprisingly, to the advantage of those negotiators (Bassuener 2020, 225).

20 On the issue of constitutional reform, at least, and arguably on almost all policy issues given the way the electoral laws and districts operate.

21 The term ‘deliberative’ has helpfully been defined by Ghai and Galli (2006) to mean “a process of negotiation which is based on clear goals (of the national interest and social justice) and sufficient information and knowledge, aimed at exchanges of ideas, clarification of differences, persuasion and agreement. This requires a degree of facilitation, and a critical question is who does this and under what procedures.”

22 The idea that political elite’s decision-making is in the name of ‘the people’ would no longer ring hollow and the people would find it more difficult to blame political elites alone for intransigence given that all the people will now have an opportunity to participate.

23 Another title may be the Millennium Magna Carta or the Charter of the People.

24 Given the different paths Croatia and Bosnia have taken following the war and the relative political ‘success’ of Croatia the comparison is immensely useful in analysing variations, if any, in ‘culture’ and levels of apathy.

25 The World Values Survey is a global database for social scientists studying changing values and their impact on social and political life. The WVS has been carried out in close collaboration with the European Values Study and encompasses data of representative national surveys from ninety-seven societies around the globe, containing almost 90 percent of the world’s population. These surveys show pervasive changes in what people want out of life and in what they believe. In order to monitor these changes, the EVS/WVS has executed seven waves of surveys, from 1981 to 2019. Data set sources: World Values Survey 1981-2019.

26 A poem called “A Text About A Text” by Mak Dizdar [1917-1971] (2009, 71).

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