Status of the Deputy Ministers

Pursuant to Article V.4(b) of the Constitution, the Deputy Ministers are not members of the Council of Ministers. As such, their votes are not counted when a decision is submitted to a vote. The question of the role of the Deputy Ministers has been raised on several occasions in the last ten years.

Initially, Deputy Ministers were used to ensure equal representation of constituent peoples in every single ministry. As a result, every Minister had two deputies.²⁸²⁵ The 2002 Law ruled out this possibility²⁸²⁶ in an attempt to end the practice of dividing every ministry into three ethnically compact sub-ministries. As an exception to this, the Minister of Defence, which we have seen was established at the level of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 2004, has two deputies. This exception was justified by the political sensitivity of this reform.

Another question arose when amendments to the Law were enacted in October 2007, which enabled a Deputy Minister to temporarily perform the duties of a Minister from the day of resignation, dismissal or permanent inability of a Minister until his/her successor takes office.²⁸²⁷ Before enactment of those amendments, the replacement of the Minister by his or her Deputy was conditioned upon a formal delegation of competence by the Minister. Therefore, in the absence of such a delegation, the work of the Ministry and of the Council of Ministers was conditioned upon the willingness of the Minister to formally delegate his/her competency or continue working pending replacement.²⁸²⁸

Aside from the issue of the representation of the Entities and constituent peoples in the Council of Ministers that this provision has raised (discussed further below), the possibility for Deputy Ministers to take over the duties from a Minister without formal delegation would need to be examined in respect to its conformity with the first sentence of Article V.4(a) of the Constitution, which limits the membership of the Council of Ministers to the Chair and the Ministers. It is clear however that the impact that the replacement of the Minister on the overall representation of constituent peoples in the Council of Ministers is mitigated by the enactment of a new Article 18, paragraph 4 which provides that the vote of a Deputy Minister cannot be considered as a vote of any member of a constituent people.²⁸²⁹