Powers of the Council of Ministers

The responsibility of the Council of Ministers is succinctly described in Article V.4(a) of the Constitution as one of “carrying out the policies and decisions of Bosnia and Herzegovina in the fields referred to in Article III.1, 4 and 5 and reporting to the Parliamentary Assembly”.

The wording concerning the responsibility of the Council of Ministers is consistent with the language used in Article III.1 of the Constitution, which lists the responsibilities of the institutions of Bosnia and Herzegovina.²⁸⁴⁵ However, one may wonder how the tasks are distributed between the Council of Ministers, which carries out the policies and decisions of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Presidency which, pursuant to Article V.3(e) executes the decisions of the Parliamentary Assembly. This problem was also raised by the Venice Commission in its Opinion on the Constitutional Situation in Bosnia and Herzegovina,²⁸⁴⁶ wherein it noted the considerable risk of overlap between the responsibilities of the Presidency for executing the decisions of the Parliamentary Assembly (Article V.3(e)) and the responsibility of the Council of Ministers to carry out the policies and decisions at the State level (Article V.4(a)).

The responsibility of the Council of Ministers is to carry out the policies and decisions of Bosnia and Herzegovina in certain fields. In many instances, it is the Council of Ministers that has defined policies. By way of illustration, strategies and policy documents were adopted in a number of fields either on the initiative of the Council of Ministers²⁸⁴⁷ or as requested by the Parliamentary Assembly.²⁸⁴⁸

Another specific task assigned to the Council of Ministers can be found in Article V.3(f), which relates to the powers of the Presidency. Under this provision, the Presidency proposes, upon the recommendation of the Council of Ministers, an annual budget to the Parliamentary Assembly. The emphasis seems to be put on the role of proponent played by the Presidency. However, the practice has evolved in that respect. It is the Council of Ministers, specifically the Minister of Finance and Treasury that prepares the draft budget and coordinates with the institutions in this respect.²⁸⁴⁹

As such, the practice until recently left the more formal role of endorsement to the Presidency, even though from a strictly Constitutional standpoint, the Presidency remained the proponent. However, over the last two years, the Presidency has interpreted its role in a more robust manner. This is of course largely due to the fact that the Presidency includes two members belonging to parties that are either not represented in the Council of Ministers or do not have the possibility to block its decisions. The procedure of adoption of the budget for 2008 is a case in point: the Presidency refused, on two occasions, to endorse the budget as proposed by the Council of Ministers. Instead of looking for a compromise in the Presidency and to amend the recommended budget accordingly, the Presidency sent the budget back to the Council of Ministers. It is only because the Council of Ministers eventually felt that it could not accommodate the requests of certain members of the Presidency that the final budget proposal was amended by the Presidency. If the 2008 case illustrates that the Presidency has the power to amend the budget recommended by the Council of Ministers, it had never before exercised this power, nor had it taken action that undermined the general integrity of a budget prepared by professionals in the Ministry of Finance.

The importance of the Council of Ministers in the adoption of the budget has even been strengthened with the adoption of the Law on the National Fiscal Council²⁸⁵⁰ which establishes a body in which the State and the Entity governments coordinate their fiscal policies and adopt the proposed ceiling (upper limit) of borrowing and the proposed fiscal objectives of the respective budgets for the institutions of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Entities.²⁸⁵¹

(d) Monitoring the realization of the set objectives and criteria in issuing and executing the budget, as well as the taking of certain corrective measures and activities; […]

As a result, we are now facing a somewhat awkward situation whereby a law of the Parliamentary Assembly of Bosnia and Herzegovina seeks to bind the proponent of the budget to respect a decision of a body in which only the Council of Ministers is represented. This seems to upset the distribution of tasks between the executive bodies of Bosnia and Herzegovina by which the Council of Ministers ‘recommends’ a budget while the Presidency ‘proposes’ it. The choice to establish such fiscal council by law also raises concerns since it is doubtful whether such a law can bind the Entities in the exercise of their budgetary competencies.