Home > 1.2 Equal suffrage > BOSNIA & HERZEGOVINA - Amicus Curiae Brief for the Constitutional Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina on the Mode of Election of Delegates to the House of Peoples of the Parliament of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina
 
 
 
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Paragraph 48
 

Seventeen countries in Europe, including BiH, practice bicameralism. The method of selecting a second chamber is context dependent, the purpose of the second chamber and the historical traditions of the country in question are key contextual determinants. The Venice Commission has reported: “It is very difficult to identify a pattern and there is an extraordinary heterogeneity of models for selecting the members of Second Chambers. Decision on how to select a Second Chamber is context-dependent and it results from pondering, on the one hand, the functions assigned to the chamber with the historical traditions on institutional representation, on the other hand.”  With respect to the selection of Second chambers being context-dependent, the Constitutional Court of BiH held in the constituent peoples case (U-5/98), pointing to the special context BiH, that “Minimum or proportional representation in the Federation legislature must be interpreted from a different angle. To the extent that there is a bicameral parliamentary structure in the first Chamber based on universal and equal suffrage without any ethnic distinctions and that the second Chamber, the House of Peoples, also provides for the representation and participation of others, there is not prima facie a system of total exclusion from the right to stand as a candidate”.