On 18 April 2016, Group for Legal and Political Studies (GLPS), in partnership with Analitika –Center for Social Research, Belgrade Centre for Human Rights and Center for Research and Policy Making (CRPM) have organized a regional conference entitled ‘Constitutional Courts in the Former Yugoslavia: The Role and Impact in Times of Transition’, held in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. It is widely accepted in constitutional scholarship that constitutional courts have the potential to act as crucial “liberalizing” political actors in states in democratic transition, playing the role of a key democratic control and dispute resolution mechanism in the face of considerable constitutional uncertainty characterizing transitional states. But did they manage to realize such potential and meet high popular and scholarly expectations? It is widely accepted in constitutional scholarship that constitutional courts have the potential to act as crucial “liberalizing” political actors in states in democratic transition, playing the role of a key democratic control and dispute resolution mechanism in the face of considerable constitutional uncertainty characterizing transitional states. But did they manage to realize such potential and meet high popular and scholarly expectations? Attempts to answer this complex question empirically have been relatively rare. In the European context, scholars have mostly, if not exclusively focused on Central and Eastern Europe, noting a degree of positive influence of constitutional courts in transition processes ranging from moderate to significant. Based on the results of a RRPP project implemented in 2014-2016, this conference aimed at looking at the role and contribution of constitutional courts to democratic transition, focusing on four successor states of the former Yugoslavia (Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Macedonia, and Serbia). This conference aimed to shed light on the competences, positioning, and overall performance of constitutional courts in resolving important political and social questions in the successor states of the former Yugoslavia. The central question the conference address was whether, how, under what conditions, and with what consequences the constitutional courts have positioned themselves as constitutional-political actors and true agents of legal, social and political change in this part of Europe. The project team was joined by keynote speaker Professor Bojan Bugarič from the Faculty of Law at the University of Ljubljana and other notable experts in the field, including, Alex Schwartz from the School of Law at Queen’s University Belfast, Sanja Barić from the University of Rijeka Law Faculty, and Margarita Nikolovska, a judge of the Constitutional Court of BiH.

Venue: Hotel Bristol, Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina.