President of Bosnia’s autonomous Republika Srpska has two weeks to appeal the ruling by Sarajevo court.
Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik has been sentenced to one year in prison for defying the rulings of the top international official overseeing peace in the Balkan country.
The court in the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo, on Wednesday also banned the president of Republika Srpska, the country’s autonomous Serb republic, from participating in politics for six years.
Dodik was indicted in 2023 for signing laws that suspended rulings by the constitutional court and by international peace envoy Christian Schmidt.
He has rejected the indictment and retaliated with measures to reduce the state’s presence in the Serb-dominated region of Bosnia by banning the state prosecutor, the state court, and the intelligence agency.
Under criminal law, Bosnians can pay a fine instead of facing jail time if the sentence is no more than one year.
Dodik has two weeks to appeal the ruling, which will become official when the appeal process is over. Neither he nor his lawyers were present in court for the sentencing.
“There is no more Bosnia-Herzegovina as of today,” he told a crowd of supporters in Banja Luka. “I need the support of the people and I will go to the end.”
Dodik said that he spoke on the phone with Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic and with Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban, whom he called a friend. He invited Vucic to come to Banja Luka to discuss “what we are going to do next”.
Dodik said the Bosnian Serb parliament will vote later Wednesday to reject the legal proceedings against him. Lawmakers will also approve several laws banning the work of central Bosnian legal institutions from the Serb-controlled half of Bosnia, he said.
Bosniak official Camil Durakovic said the verdict against Dodik showed that “no individual is above the state and that everyone will be held accountable for their actions”.
There are fears that the verdict could increase tensions in Bosnia, which witnessed a bloody ethnic war in the 1990s and has since been split into two autonomous regions: the Serb-dominated Republika Srpska and the Federation shared by Croats and Bosniaks.
The regions are linked via a weak central government that has been unable to bridge lingering ethnic divides.
The court acquitted a second defendant, Milos Lucic, the former acting director of the Serb entity’s Official Gazette. He had also been accused of deliberately obstructing the enforcement of decisions made by Schmidt.
Dragan Bursac, a columnist and political analyst for Al Jazeera Balkans, said that the ban from political activity was “the part of sentence which hurts [Dodik] the most”.
“The real concern is whether he’ll be able to hold other political positions within Bosnia and Herzegovina or not,” Bursac said.
The case has been widely seen as a potential test of the Balkan nation’s central government after Dodik flouted the country’s peace deal and court system.
