Brčko as per the Dayton Agreement

The Dayton Peace Agreement was created after long negotiations between Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia and Serbia. “The peace agreement for Bosnia is the most ambitious document of its kind in modern history, perhaps in history as a whole. A traditional peace treaty aims at ending a war between nations and coalitions of nations, while here it is a question of setting up a state on the basis of little more than ruins and rivalries of a bitter war”.³⁵⁷⁸ This Agreement is a set of independent international agreements put together in a whole through the General Framework Agreement in Bosnia and Herzegovina. It was not possible to come to an agreement on Brčko so that the regulation of the issue of Brčko was submitted to arbitration, where the parties were to come to an agreement. Details were regulated in Annex 2 of the Dayton Peace Agreement. The agreement contains 5 items:

■ The Parties agree to binding arbitration of the disputed portion of the Inter- Entity Boundary Line between the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Republika Srpska;

■ The Federation shall appoint one arbitrator, and the Republika Srpska shall appoint one arbitrator. A third arbitrator shall be selected by agreement of the Parties’ appointees or if they do not agree, the third arbitrator shall be appointed by the President of the International Court of Justice. The third arbitrator shall serve as the presiding officer of the arbitral tribunal;

■ Unless otherwise agreed by the Parties, the proceedings shall be conducted in accordance with the UNCITRAL rules. The arbitrators shall apply relevant legal and equitable principles;

■ The area indicated above shall continue to be administered as currently;

■ The arbitrators shall issue their decision no later than 14 December 1996, i.e., one year from the entry into force of the Dayton Agreement. The decision shall be final and binding, and the Parties shall implement it without delay.