CONSTITUTIONAL JUDICIARY AND JUDICIAL REVIEW IN THE BALKAN CONSOCIATIONAL DEMOCRACIES – A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF MACEDONIAN WITH BOSNIAN EXPERIENCE

Abstract

 The purpose of this paper is to consider the question of examining the constitutionality in countries whose political system has elements of consociational democracy. The consociational model was traced back to the late 60s of the 20th century in the works of the American political scientist of Dutch origin, Arend Lijphart. From the mid-90s of the XX century, this model has become an extremely popular constitutional engineering within the International Community itself, which was involved in the process of post-conflict international state-building, leading to the creation of new constitutional arrangements such as the case of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) and the Dayton Peace Agreement (DPA) 1995, but also the Republic of North Macedonia (RNM) following the 2001 Ohrid Framework Agreement (OFA). Therefore, the interest of this paper is to examine the position, jurisdiction, and institutional structure of judicial review bodies in these two countries of consociational democracy in Southeast Europe, by comparing Bosnia and Herzegovina’s experience with that of the Republic of North Macedonia.