Bosnia-Herzegovina 1995
The December 1995 constitution for Bosnia-Herzegovina was written, as part of the Dayton Peace Accords. It followed several years of war in the former Yugoslav Republic, and a series of failed international efforts to stop the fighting. The peace accord was the result of years of shuttle diplomacy between the warring parties: Bosnian Muslims, Bosnian Serbs, Bosnian Croats, Yugoslav Serbs and Croatian Croats conducted by U.S. and European diplomats. In the final rounds of these negotiations the Bosnian Serbs were represented by the Yugoslavian Serbs as the Bosnian Serb leader was indicted as a war criminal and not allowed to participate. The penultimate diplomatic effort was three rounds of U.S. lead negotiations which outlined the form of the peace agreement and the constitution: the Washington Agreements of March 30, 1994, the Geneva negotiations of September 8, 1995 where a set of basic principles for the constitution was agreed to and the New York meetings of September 15, 1995 which laid out further basic principles.
In the final round of negotiations at Dayton the warring parties were kept in isolation from the outside world until they came to an agreement. The drafting process was controlled by the international Contact Group and as such was not “democratic” or “representative”, nor were there established procedures or rules for the conduct of the negotiations other than the parties could not meet face to face. A committee of diplomats and experts from the Contact Group wrote the initial draft of the constitution for the warring parties. This draft was then presented to the separate parties for comment and proposals in response to the draft. Representatives of the Contact Group then chose which proposals and comments to pass on to the other parties. This process was used until an agreement was reached. The constitution was considered ratified once the peace accord was signed in Paris on November 21, 1995. An important part of the agreement was accepting the presence of a large NATO peacekeeping force to ensure the agreement held.