The topic of this year’s debate addresses many current issues that truly present some of the key challenges that affect the future path we will tread as a global society and as individual countries forming their own national and international policies. The degree of our commitment to prioritizing the common values we have chosen to protect will therefore determine we succeed in fulfilling our shared aspirations.
The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic has taught us an important lesson on how easily the existing international system can be shaken, but it has also shown us on how strong and resilient our multilateral and international institutions must be for them to be able to respond to crisis situations. All of a sudden, international relations were threatened while human rights were restricted. Multilateralism seemed to have collapsed. The gap between rich, developed countries, on the one hand, and less developed, poorer countries, on the other, has proven to be greater than ever in terms of access to medical equipment, medicines and vaccines. For the sake of social and economic recovery, the only thing left to do under such circumstances was to hope that the resilience of national economies and health systems, as well as international institutions, including the bodies of the United Nations, could combat the pandemic and discover and distribute vaccines.
At the same time, I would also like to emphasize the importance of bilateral cooperation and assistance from neighbouring or friendly countries, which in many regions, including my own, were the first countries to provide concrete aid and signs of solidarity — well before multilateral institutions could respond to the COVID-19 pandemic crisis. That gave us hope and showed the importance of good bilateral relations. It also justified investing in regional cooperation capacities. Accordingly, I would like to commend some of the numerous regional organizations from the Western Balkans that have helped sustain the economy and facilitate the flow of people and basic goods under the new circumstances. I am primarily referring to the Central European Free Trade Agreement and the Regional Cooperation Council of South-Eastern Europe.
The pandemic has changed the world and affected the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Under the new circumstances, the SDGs need to be seen in a whole new light. However, one of today’s most important issues, which is closely related to the notion that global society needs to fulfil the SDGs, is how to properly respond to the needs of the planet. Climate change and global warming, both visible and scientifically proven through the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), are key issues that are restricting the path to sustainable development. According to the 2018 IPCC special report, our efforts to slow global warming and combat climate change are generally not yielding the results we need to achieve by 2050, and this year’s report issues the same warning.
Climate change is no longer a matter of warnings from the scientific community. It is a crisis situation that is already upon us. Finding answers to climate change is a costly process, but it will cost even more if we do not take the need to accelerate climate-change mitigation activities seriously. We have taken on that commitment because the survival of humankind, dependent as it is on mitigating temperature rise, is a value that we must defend at all costs. We did not choose that value; it chose us.
I believe that, in the long run, this necessary response will cost the less developed and developing countries — the countries that continue to rely on energy derived from fossil fuels — the most. As a rule, those countries do not have sufficient capacity or resources to make a rapid and equitable transition to green energy sources. That will affect their ability to achieve the SDGs in the medium term. Therefore, financial support for the implementation of the green agenda is extremely important, with contributions from the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, as well as such regional associations as the European Union (EU).
In addition to the obligations set forth in the Paris Agreement, additional standards are imposed by the EU and accepted by countries such as Bosnia and Herzegovina as part of the process of stabilization and association with the Union. In my country, Bosnia and Herzegovina, approximately 40 per cent of our electricity generation is derived from our green-energy
capacity. However, the gradual shutdown of thermal power plants, and therefore most of our mines, which we must undertake in the next 25 to 30 years, will cause a shortage of electricity that can hardly be replaced in a timely fashion by our green-energy capacity if we are to also preserve rivers and ecological biodiversity in accordance with international norms. These are some of the real circumstances and challenges that we face, and many other States present in this Hall, I believe, face similar challenges. Nevertheless, Bosnia and Herzegovina stands behind its promise to contribute to reducing greenhouse-gas emissions.
One of the consequences of the slowdown in sustainable development that we are facing is the flight of the working-age population to developed countries. According to available statistics, nearly 10 per cent of the population has emigrated from Bosnia and Herzegovina since the last census, in 2013, mostly from the population of working age as well as young families with children. That is why I would like to draw attention to the fact that, in addition to the well-known wave of economic migrants from the Asia, the Middle East and North Africa towards my country — and we have tried to provide humanitarian aid, food and accommodation for them — we are also facing the outflow of our own population, which will cause additional social problems for our society. Our people are leaving Bosnia and Herzegovina in search of better business and life opportunities. They are also seeking security in more orderly societies that more actively promote and protect human rights values. They are drawn by the prospect of living in an environment where their knowledge and work can create a life of certainty for them within a rational social order.
It is for that reason that I want to emphasize the protection of human rights as the next great value. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights has already established it as a principle. In Europe, we also have the European Convention on Human Rights, implemented under the auspices of the Council of Europe, while the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union came into effect in 2009. Recently, however, support for human rights values seem to have weakened, as we are seeing them applied selectively and approached on the basis of double standards. I consider such trends a serious threat to the preservation of our system for protecting human rights.
The intensification of ethnic politics in my country, based on exclusion and ethnic chauvinist tendencies, along with growing religious intolerance and faltering secularism in the Western Balkans region, is extremely worrying. After living through the 1992-1995 war, the citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina are very sensitive to such social disturbances, especially considering the genocide determined to have been committed in Srebrenica by the verdict of the International Court of Justice in The Hague and confirmed by the judgments of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.
In that regard, I would like to emphasize to the Assembly that my country is considered not only a successful example of peacebuilding but also one of the maintenance of peace and development of institutions in the context of its United Nations mandate. The Constitution of Bosnia and Herzegovina is part of the international peace agreement in Bosnia and Herzegovina known as the Dayton Peace Agreement. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the European Convention on Human Rights are also integral parts of our Constitution. However, in the past few years, attempts to degrade basic human and civil rights and eliminate individual citizens as subjects of human rights have put increasing pressure on our society. Bosnia and Herzegovina’s complex system of institutions, based on the Peace Agreement, has made it difficult to reach the political consensus needed to enable my country to move on from Dayton Agreement, which ended the war, to becoming a functioning State with prospects for joining the European Union and NATO in a way that embraces all the values that democracy, the rule of law and the protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms demand.
In order to illustrate the selectivity with which our international human rights instruments are being applied, I want to consider this very important area of the protection of human rights from the point of view of the country I come from. I believe that we all share the view that the protection of human rights in every sector of society is a necessary condition for the creation of stable democracies in which peace and prosperity prevail. However, viewing this through the prism of the political system in Bosnia and Herzegovina, I would like to take this opportunity to share with the Assembly a few important elements that are unfortunately part of the other, negative, darker side of the story.
The General Framework Agreement for Peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina, initialled in Dayton and signed in Paris in 1995, is in force in Bosnia and
Herzegovina. As annex 4, the Constitution of Bosnia and Herzegovina is an integral part of the Agreement. Its preamble states clearly and unequivocally that among other things, it is based on the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. While it is understood that accession to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights does not impose a direct legal obligation on acceding countries, it is unquestionably a system of values that among other things aims to create a society both within and beyond the countries themselves that is founded on the equality of every human being on the planet with regard to their basic human rights.
Unfortunately, that system of values based on the equality of every individual within a society does not exist in Bosnia and Herzegovina. I also want to point out that in five judgments against Bosnia and Herzegovina, an international court, the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, has established the existence of systemic discrimination or inequality among my country’s citizens. That inequality is reflected in several areas of life, including politically — because not all citizens have equal rights in the electoral system — but also because those same citizens do not have equal rights and opportunities in social life, such as the right to work. The political system in Bosnia and Herzegovina is such that it gives preference to someone’s ethnicity. Based on their ethnicity, my country’s citizens have more or fewer rights, depending on which part of the country they live in. I would like to take this opportunity to remind the Assembly that discrimination based on a person’s ethnic origin is one of the forms of racial discrimination set out in paragraph 1 of article 1 of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, adopted by the United Nations in 1965.
The complexity of this issue is evident in the attempts to discriminate among and impose inequality on Bosnia and Herzegovina’s citizens, even through international diplomatic activity, by emphasizing some citizens’ ethnicity and demanding greater rights for ethnic communities supported by neighbouring countries, and always to the detriment of fundamental human rights. What that means is that the collective rights of some, which are not expressed in international law, are being placed above the human rights of individuals. Let me say that such things are unacceptable.
Furthermore, the diplomatic activities of various actors call for additional discrimination on ethnic grounds in order to create an atmosphere conducive to a process for self-determination within those ethnic communities, with the ultimate goal being the dissolution or disintegration of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the annexation of parts of its territory by neighbouring countries. That foments inequality in human rights, which completely devalues and ignores the provisions of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Those same factors negate the judgments of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, which identified the existence of genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and even joint criminal enterprises, and further established that all those heinous crimes were committed on the basis of differences in the ethnicities of the citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina. That negates one of the Universal Declaration’s fundamental human rights, the right to life.
Without any moral qualms, war criminals are glorified and rewarded, and in my view that is in direct contradiction to another principle of the United Nations, which is ending impunity for war crimes. That raises other questions, which demand clear answers. How should we deal with the political and national factors that are negating the decisions of courts established by the United Nations, and how should we address specific cases where verdicts convicting the perpetrators of crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and ethnic cleansing are denied? Can those who deny such verdicts and hide perpetrators of genocide and war crimes even be a part of the international legal order? That question goes directly to the heart of the foundations of international law and the United Nations Organization itself.
At the same time, the principles of universal jurisdiction are being abused for political purposes outside the prescribed procedures and agreements that have been concluded between the States and that clearly specify the modalities for prosecuting war- crime suspects who must be held accountable. Those war-crime suspects are citizens of the countries that have primary responsibility for this. Using universal jurisdiction in a selective and political way deeply compromises the principles of criminal law and legal security, and therefore of human rights. It also undermines confidence injudicial mechanisms.
On the other hand, the various policies aimed at imposing discrimination and inequality on the citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina represent an attempt to invade my country’s constitutional and legal system
of my country in order to secure a so-called golden key or golden share in the country’s management and decision-making. There is no way they should be permitted to do this by any international law, including the Charter of the United Nations. These efforts on the diplomatic front, which deny individuals their fundamental human rights in order to achieve obvious goals based on some imaginary collective rights, do not represent good-neighbourly relations. They are aimed at concealing the strategic goal of appropriating parts of the territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
These trends clearly ignore the principles of human rights established by a number of texts of international law, including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It is the politically dangerous goals behind them that are daily destabilizing the Western Balkans and that are aimed at the territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina. That is evident in their efforts to impose inequality among citizens based on their ethnicity, which, let me remind Member States once again, is a form of racial discrimination, and to create ethnically pure territorial areas. The point of explaining this is to give real examples of how there can be a political agenda behind the neglect of human rights and the creation of an environment of inequality among individual citizens, and that can lead to the destabilization of entire regions such as the Western Balkans. Besides being completely unacceptable, it is also very dangerous.
I am discussing the situation in my country in the context of the importance of the mechanisms of the United Nations. By means of two resolutions, including Security Council resolution 1031 (1995), the United Nations established the institution of the High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina to monitor the implementation of the Dayton Peace Agreement. The United Nations itself is therefore obligated to protect the international order by protecting acts of international law, one of which is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. I therefore believe that this is the right place to emphasize our expectation that the international community’s new High Representative in Bosnia and Herzegovina will take into account the importance of protecting our international legal acts and their fundamental values. That is one of his most important tasks.
Otherwise, if the international community in Bosnia and Herzegovina wants to abandon the implementation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, we have to ask if the Universal Declaration is even necessary if its implementation is selective. Should we even bother to talk about the protection of human rights in general if in the specific case of Bosnia and Herzegovina, where the United Nations still has an executive mandate through the Office of the High Representative, we do not show by example that we are willing to stand up for shared values such as the protection of human rights and the equality of every citizen in relation to those who are different and other?
Despite all the differences within Bosnia and Herzegovina, including among the international community represented by the Peace Implementation Council in Bosnia and Herzegovina, which assists the High Representative, I believe that the sole guiding light for my country’s future political development, as a pledge to preserve its peace and future, should be respect for the values of human rights. All the people of my country, regardless of their identity, ethnicity, religious affiliation or lack of one, should have the same rights. If not, we will end up in an Orwellian society, where it is accepted that ultimately some people are more important than others. That will always jeopardize a society’s stability and undermine peace and security. From this rostrum, I urge the institutions of the United Nations to insist on the importance of protecting human rights in every area of their activities.
Lastly, I would like to express my support for the efforts of the Secretary-General, who with the help of his staff and the United Nations agencies has managed to preserve the role of the United Nations in the difficult circumstances of the pandemic. I would also like to thank the President for his effort this year to provide us with an opportunity to exchange views in person on the world’s problems today as well as to discuss our social actions in the countries we come from. I believe that next year we will have a general debate under better epidemiological circumstances. That certainly requires that we promote the necessity of vaccination as the only scientifically proven way to avoid not just fatal consequences for human health but also severe economic consequences for society.