# Bosnian Court Seeks International Arrest Warrant for Milorad Dodik
*Event date: 2025-03-27*
By IO Digest Desk
A court in Bosnia and Herzegovina moved on March 27 to seek an international arrest warrant for Milorad Dodik, escalating the confrontation between the country's central institutions and the pro-Russia leader of Republika Srpska, the Serb-majority entity that makes up one half of the Bosnian state.
DW and AP reported that the court's request now rests with Interpol, the global police coordination body. The Bosnian court said the step was justified because Dodik and another senior Republika Srpska official had shown they could be outside the country at any time. The move followed a domestic arrest warrant issued the previous week for Dodik and two other top officials after they defied the authority of Bosnia's central legal institutions.
The legal dispute is tied to a broader struggle over Bosnia's postwar constitutional order. DW reported that Dodik last month barred police representing Bosnia's central authorities from operating in Republika Srpska, though the Constitutional Court later suspended that measure. Bosnian prosecutors then accused Dodik and another senior official of attacking the constitutional order through their separatist actions.
Dodik has repeatedly threatened to pull Republika Srpska away from Bosnia and Herzegovina. Both reports said those threats have fueled fears that he is undermining the Dayton peace framework, the US-brokered agreement that ended the 1992-95 war and created Bosnia's current structure of two entities bound together by central institutions. DW noted that Dodik's recent conduct threatened the same settlement that was designed to stop sectarian conflict after the breakup of Yugoslavia.
His travel in defiance of Bosnian court action helped trigger the international warrant request. AP reported that Dodik traveled first to neighboring Serbia, where he met President Aleksandar Vucic, and then continued to Israel. DW similarly said he had crossed into Serbia earlier in the week and attended an antisemitism conference in Jerusalem on the event date. Dodik dismissed the legal process in remarks carried by AP, calling Bosnia a failed state and saying the abuse of justice was continuing.
The dispute has opened a regional dimension as well. AP reported that Serbian Interior Minister Ivica Dacic said both Dodik and Republika Srpska parliamentary speaker Nenad Stevandic hold Serbian citizenship, and that Belgrade filed a protest note to Interpol over Bosnia's request. Vucic also said Serbia would not arrest Dodik, directly signaling that enforcement could be complicated even if an international notice is circulated.
The case builds on an earlier judgment against Dodik. DW said a court in Sarajevo had sentenced him the previous month to one year in prison and barred him from office for six years for defying Bosnia's top international overseer. Dodik and his allies said they did not recognize the Bosnian prosecution office and would not appear in Sarajevo for questioning, turning what might have remained a courtroom dispute into a full institutional standoff.
That standoff now carries clear security risks. AP said there have been fears of clashes between police loyal to Dodik and Bosnian state forces, pushing the country into its biggest crisis since the war that killed more than 100,000 people. Bosnia's long-stalled bid for European Union membership is also affected, because the same unresolved ethnic and constitutional disputes continue to slow its progress.
The request for an international warrant does not guarantee Dodik's arrest. But it does show Bosnia's central institutions pushing the conflict onto an international policing stage, and it underscores how a long-running separatist challenge has evolved into the country's gravest constitutional test in years.
