The leader of the main Croat ethnic party in Bosnia, Dragan Covic, said on Monday that Bosnia will never become a unitary state through the domination of majority ethnic groups and repeated that he hopes that changes of BiH’s election law will result in the rights of Croats in the country being protected.

“Bosnia and Herzegovina will never be a unitary state. It will not be a civic state either, in the way that some are thinking and trying to implement it through domination over others,” the leader of Bosnia’s Croat Demoratic Union (HDZ BiH) said at the Fifth Congress of the Association of the Croat community of Herceg-Bosna in Mostar.

In BiH, the rights of citizens are realized with the possibility of electing representatives through municipal and city councils, parliamentary houses and county assemblies, while the Presidency of BiH and the upper government levels exist to protect the rights of the three constituent peoples in the country.

“This is non-negotiable,” Covic said.

He said he expects the Election Law to be changed so that Croats can elect their representatives in the houses of the peoples and the tripartite Presidency within this year. “Nobody can or will deny us legitimate representation and our rights as a constituent people in our homeland,” he said.

Covic argued that Bosnia can implement rulings by the European Court of Human Rights and the Constitutional Court by forming two electoral units in the country’s semi-autonomous Federation (FBiH) entity, which is shared mostly between Bosniaks and Croats.

He said that the deadline for election reform that he and the leader of the main Bosniak party, Bakir Izetbegovic, set in an agreement that enabled elections to take place in the city of Mostar will expire on June 17.

However, there is no progress on election reform, he said.