Language Research

Constitutions of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Republika Srpska (1995)

Updated (November 2003)

BROADCASTING LEGISLATION AND MINORITY RIGHTS

After many attempts to reconstruct the public broadcasting in Bosnia and Herzegovina, a set of laws has been recently imposed regulating this field.

• Law on the Basis of the Public Broadcasting System and on the Public Broadcasting Service of Bosnia and Herzegovina (May 23, 2002)
• Law on Radio and Television of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina (May 24, 2002)
• Law on Radio and Television of the Republika Srpska (May 24, 2002)

As for broadcasting laws, there are no rules that either directly support, or directly forbid the minorities to broadcast in their own language.

Due to the lack of provisions in both Constitutions (the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Republika Srpska) on how to regulate the media, the Independent Media Commission (IMC) and then the Communications Regulatory Agency (CRA) were established through the Office of the High Representative (OHR), the lead international civilian institution in BiH, responsible for implementing the Dayton Peace Agreement.

The CRA does not focus specifically on minority-language broadcasting and in general, it does not push for minority languages in broadcasting.

The Republic of Serbia has recently adopted the Law on the Official Use of Language and Script, which, among other things, regulates also the use of language in the public media. This law contains a number of restrictions on minorities' rights to use their language and alphabet.

Article 4

The parties involved in the publishing business can use both "ijekavica" and "ekavica" pronunciations, but they are obligated to use the Cyrillic script.

Source: Minority-language Related Broadcasting and Legislation in the OSCE, Program in Comparative Media Law and Policy (PCMLP), Center for Socio-Legal Studies, Wolfson College, Oxford University & Institute for Information Law (IViR) (http://www.ivir.nl/index-english.html), Universiteit van Amsterdam (Study commissioned by the OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities), April 2003, edited by T. McGonagle (IViR), B. Davis Noll & M. Price (PCMLP), http://www.ivir.nl/publications/mcgonagle/Minority-language%20broadcasting.pdf

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