Bosnia court sentences Serb leader Dodik to one year in jail

Milorad Dodik is sentenced for ignoring rulings from an international envoy that oversees the country’s peace accords.

A Bosnian court has sentenced Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik to one year in prison for defying the rulings of the international peace official overseeing peace in the Balkan country.

The court on Wednesday also handed him a six-year ban from the presidential office.

Dodik, president of Bosnia’s autonomous Serb Republic, was indicted in 2023 for signing laws that suspended rulings by the constitutional court and by international peace envoy Christian Schmidt.

The leader and his lawyers were not in the court during the sentencing. Dodik has said that he would disobey any conviction and threatened “radical measures” in response, including eventual secession of the Serb-run entity in Bosnia called Republika Srpska from the rest of the country.

The court acquitted a second defendant, Milos Lucic, the former acting director of the Serb entity’s Official Gazette. He had also been accused of deliberately obstructing the enforcement of decisions made by Schmidt.

The first-instance verdict could still be amended. Dragan Bursac, a columnist and political analyst for Al Jazeera Balkans, said it remains to be seen whether he “can buy out his sentence, if it’s possible, and whether he’ll be freed or if a compromise will be reached.”

“The real concern is whether he’ll be able to hold other political positions within Bosnia and Herzegovina or not, the part of sentence which hurts him the most,” Bursac said.

“In a month time, we’ll know the second-instance verdict, but I don’t believe the judicial system will stray much, and I don’t expect significant changes in the appellate process. These are likely the final details of Dodik’s sentence.”