Speaking to reporters a month before general elections in the country, Schwarz-Schilling recalled that in the past 100 days the Bosnian parliament had not adopted any of the important laws which had been waiting for adoption for months.
Those include laws on higher education, salaries, obligatory relations, bank supervision, the pharmaceutical industry and some other laws whose adoption was stopped by parties which make up the ruling coalitions, each having done it for its own reason.
The High Representative said that it was not accidental that this was happening in the pre-election period and that this proved that political parties in Bosnia-Herzegovina were again playing the ethnicity card and ignoring the real interests of ordinary people.
He therefore called on voters to take into account such behaviour of politicians when they go to the polls in a month's time.
Continuing such behaviour will have serious consequences for the country, including the possibility of the international community giving up on its plan to close down the Office of the High Representative (OHR).
According to previous announcements, the OHR is to be closed down by the end of June 2007, but Schwarz-Schilling warned that the final decision on this would be made in February next year, after the situation in the country was reassessed and after it was established if the newly elected authorities were ready to implement the reforms requested by the European Union.
Police reform will be the first and most serious challenge for the new authorities to be elected on October 1. The signing of a Stabilisation and Association Agreement, which was expected by the end of this year, will be conditional on police reform, which was stopped by the Bosnian Serb authorities which refused the establishment of police districts crossing entity borders.
Commenting on frequent requests by Bosnian Serb politicians to organise a referendum on the independence of the Serb entity, Schwarz-Schilling said that this was an illusion and that the international community would never allow it.
The High Representative, however, stressed that equally harming were statements about the abolishment of the country's two entities because they shifted public attention from the actual challenges in the implementation of the Dayton peace agreement.