By Joseph E. Schmitz
May 18, 2026
As Americans celebrate the 250th anniversary of their independence from a British tyrant named King George III, a non-elected German bureaucrat-tyrant in Bosnia and Herzegovina known as the “High Representative” has been acting as a non-elected legislature, issuing hundreds of laws pursuant to recommendations of a group of non-elected European bureaucrats stemming from a 1997 meeting in Bonn, Germany.
On May 11, 2026, High Representative Christian Schmidt resigned. The official announcement states: “After nearly five years as High Representative to Bosnia and Herzegovina, a mandate anchored in Annex 10 of the Dayton Peace Agreement, Christian Schmidt has taken the personal decision to conclude his service to the implementation of peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina. He has informed the Peace Implementation Council Steering Board of his decision and requested that they begin the work of finding his successor.”
Regardless of Schmidt’s resignation, the “Bonn Powers” must be declared void ab initio—meaning void from the beginning. To prove this, as our July 4, 1776 Declaration of Independence proclaimed: “Let Facts be submitted to a candid world.”
Key fact 1: The Office of the High Representative was established by the 1995 Dayton Peace Agreement, in which Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, and Republika Srpska agreed that this office would “coordinate the activities of the organizations and agencies involved in the civilian aspects of the peace settlement by carrying out, as entrusted by a U.N. Security Council resolution.”
Key fact 2: The three parties to the 1995 Dayton Peace Agreement never agreed to the 1997 “Bonn Powers” of their High Representative.
Key fact 3: According to the 9/11 Commission Report, two of the terrorist hijackers on September 11, 2001, were Saudi nationals who “had traveled together to fight in Bosnia in a group that journeyed to the Balkans in 1995.”
A Heritage Foundation backgrounder by Max Primorac from July 8, 2025, describes the current crisis: “Thirty years after the 1995 Dayton Peace Accords, the country is broken, deeply divided, and devoid of sovereignty. It is governed not by its three sovereign peoples—Catholic Croats, Muslim Bosniaks, and Orthodox Serbs—but by a clique of international diplomats with power to arbitrarily dismiss elected officials, reverse enacted legislation, disenfranchise voters, and impose a fictional ‘Bosnian’ civic identity that favors Muslims over Christians.”
This situation echoes the grievances against King George III in the American Declaration of Independence: “He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people… He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution…”
Attempting to force compliance with laws enacted under the “Bonn Powers”—for which the three Peace Agreement parties never agreed—is a recipe for constant turmoil or another war. Forced compliance has already evolved into what Primorac describes as “the worst political crisis since the war ended.”
On February 13, the Constitutional-Legal Commission of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s Parliament issued a 4-3 opinion stating that “the High Representative in BiH does not have constitutional competence to enact laws,” and therefore certain laws enacted by the High Representative are unconstitutional.
Mato Tadic, former Judge and two-term President of the Constitutional Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina, notes in his 2024 book that the High Representative has enacted a total of 341 laws.
In 1765, Sir William Blackstone wrote: “All manmade law is ‘a rule of civil conduct prescribed by the supreme power in a state’… Wherefore it is requisite to the very essence of a law, that it be made by the supreme power.”
Since the High Representative is not “the supreme power” within Bosnia and Herzegovina, all laws enacted through the so-called “Bonn Powers” are essentially what our Declaration of Independence describes as “pretended legislation,” and thus void ab initio.
