OHR Press Releases

The High Representative, Paddy Ashdown, today expressed his full support for the measures announced by Major General Leakey, the EUFOR Commander and Brigadier General Schook, the Commander of the NATO Headquarters in Sarajevo in response to the military induction ceremonies held in Bileca and Manjaca on 16 April 2005.

The High Representative today urged RS Police Director Dragomir Andan publicly to retract the comments he made at a press conference on 10 May, and give a clear commitment to the citizens of BiH that such an incident will never happen again.

This week marks three years since Paddy Ashdown took on the mandate of the High Representative. On his first day as High Representative Paddy Ashdown identified his primary aim as “putting BiH irreversibly on the path to statehood and on the road to Europe.”

The decision by the European Commission’s Consultative Task Force not to give a green light to the launch of Stabilisation and Association negotiations with Bosnia and Herzegovina is a disappointing but expected result, given the failure of the multi-party talks of police restructuring early this week.

The negotiations between the eleven political party leaders broke down late this evening because the RS political party leaders could not at this stage accept an agreement on police restructuring according to the EU’s three principals.

In our statement of 18 April, we called on Minister Stankovic to carry out an immediate inquiry into the incidents at the Manjaca and Bileca swearing in ceremonies.

The High Representative, Paddy Ashdown, has appointed Julia A. Baly, Peter Tinsley and Michael P. McVickeras International Prosecutor to the Special Department for War Crimes in the Prosecutor’s Office of Bosnia and Herzegovinaand Erik Nils Larson as International Prosecutor in the Special Department for Organized Crime, Economic Crime and Corrupti [...]

Reports from the press that the SDS main board is going back on the agreement made by their own negotiators at meetings at Mount Vlasic on police restructuring are disturbing. If true, the consequences would be disastrous for the RS and for BiH as a whole. It would mean that the SDS has decided to destroy its chances of moving forward to modern Eur [...]

The High Representative today met with German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder. The two talked about Bosnia and Herzegovina’s progress in achieving the requirements in order to start Stablilisation and Association negotiations, and in order for BiH to become a member of Nato’s Partnership for Peace.

The High Representative welcomed the assessment of Bosnia and Herezegovina’s progress towards PfP, given by NATO Foreign Ministers meeting in Vilnius yesterday, as a very significant and encouraging response. He said that the assessment keeps the door open for achieving an outcome that all of the citizens of BiH want.