Bosnia's top court temporarily suspends Serb region's separatist laws

By Daria Sito-Sucic

SARAJEVO (Reuters) -Bosnia's constitutional court on Friday temporarily suspended separatist laws passed by the country's Serb Republic parliament and signed by the region's nationalist leader Milorad Dodik, seen as an attack on the constitutional order.

The court said that implementation of these laws before it makes its final ruling on their constitutionality would have "serious and unavoidable consequences", endangering the constitutional and legal order and sovereignty of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

The court acted responding to an appeal by top state officials alleging the legislation represented an attack on the constitutional order, for which the Serb Republic top officials have been investigated by state prosecutors.

"Everyone who pounces on the state of Bosnia and Herzegovina must know that he will bear consequences," Denis Becirovic, the Bosniak member of tripartite presidency, said at an emergency news conference on Friday.

Becirovic called on EUFOR, the European Union peacekeeping force, to bring reserve forces and deploy them at strategic points in Bosnia.

The move came amidst a growing tension in Bosnia after a state court last week sentenced Milorad Dodik, the Serb Republic's president and a pro-Russian nationalist, to a year in prison and banned him from politics for six years.

Dodik rejected the verdict and the next day the Serb regional parliament passed legislation barring the national police and judiciary from its territory.

It marked another low point in Bosnia, which suffered a bloody ethnic conflict in the 1990s and has since been split into two autonomous regions - the Serb Republic and the Federation shared by Croats and Bosniaks. They are linked via a weak central government that has been unable to bridge lingering divisions.

On Friday, the head of Bosnia's state security agency SIPA denied the Bosnian Serb Republic's police had forced his officers out of their premises in the Serb Republic's main city of Banja Luka.

Commenting on reports that the Serb Republic Interior Ministry had sent a request to SIPA employees to vacate the building, he said: "It's nothing, just an ordinary request, a letter."

Dodik instantly dismissed the constitutional court's ruling, saying the court was not "legal" because it was lacking Serb judges, whom the Serb regional parliament had failed to elect.

He called on all Serbs working in SIPA, the state court and prosecutors' office, and the High Judicial and Prosecutorial Council, to leave their jobs so that the Serb Republic provides them with employment in its own institutions.

(Reporting by Daria Sito-Sucic, Editing by Christina Fincher, Timothy Heritage and Angus MacSwan)