ABSTRACT
The Dayton Peace Agreement (DPA) that ended the three and a half year war in Bosnia-Herzegovina (BH) included many provisions that made the document more ambitious than a simple peace treaty. The protection of human rights was paramount in ensuring that the people of Bosnia-Herzegovina would not only recover from the trauma of war in order to return and rebuild, but also to keep a focus on the long-term goal of integration into Euro-Atlantic institutions, and most importantly, into the European Union. The involvement of the Office of the High Representative (OHR) re-invigorated attention as a two-track approach was initiated to address the matter. One track involved the development of harmonized, entity-level legislation, and the other focused on re-constituting the defunct Commission to Preserve National Monuments. Very broadly speaking, the implementation progress in Bosnia-Herzegovina offers an important lesson to the future authors and implementers of other peace plans and post-conflict efforts.
