The Dayton Paris Peace Agreement on Bosnia

2 Pages 602 Words

CURRENT DEVELOPMENTS THE PROTECTION OF HUMAN RIGHTS THROUGH THE DAYTON/PARIS PEACE AGREEMENT ON BOSNIA The Bosnia Proximity Peace Talks at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio, took place from November 1 to 21, 1995, and ended with the initialing of the General Framework Agreement for Peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina (GFA) 1 and several of the annexed or related instruments by representatives of the principal states parties to the conflict in Bosnia: the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Republic of Croatia and the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The initialing was witnessed by representatives of the European Union and the five states members of the Contact Group on Bosnia. In addition, all of the twelve instruments annexed to the GFA were also initialed or otherwise endorsed on behalf of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Republika Srpska. The GFA and these instruments were formally signed in Paris on December 14, and thereby immediately entered into force. 2 As the violation of human rights was one of the central aspects of nearly four years of conflict in Bosnia, it was always understood that measures for protecting those rights would have to be one of the principal features of any settlement. The present Note describes the extensive, innovative and somewhat intricate human rights provisions of the Dayton/ Paris Peace Agreement, tracing many of them to certain earlier proposals that had been made in various international fora. 3 Now these provisions are embedded in the complex web of instruments formulated in Dayton, whose interactions must also be considered. SEQUENCE OF CONSTITUTIONAL PROPOSALS Long before negotiations opened at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, the constitutional rearrangement of, first, the former Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY) and, then, of the emerging Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina became the subject of international negotiations, in all of which the ...