The institutions and the citizens of Bosnia & Herzegovina will have access to the basic BiH, RS and FB&H legislation, through the Legislation database project.

This will increase the transparency and accountability of the public administration in BiH and enable access to existing BiH legal acts translated into English language, through an integrated portal. This could be of great importance for the international community in BiH, its organizations, diplomatic missions, foreign investors or projects providing technical and other support, that are being implemented in BiH.

In that respect, OHR, UNDP and PARCO are preparing a Memorandum of understanding to establish cooperation between these institutions in translating BiH legislation into English, and making it available online. According to this Memorandum, the PARCO is to become the hosting institution of the BiH legal acts database in English language, currently in possession of the OHR, agreed to hand it over to the PARCO. This database should be a structural part of a comprehensive legislation database in official languages of BiH. UNDP will provide the necessary technical assistance for creating the database, while its final structure and updating should be taken over by the Public Administration Reform Coordinator’s Office in BiH.

Based on the recommendations of the Public Administration System Review from 2005, the PAR Strategy and Action plan for the public administration reform foresee establishment of a comprehensive electronic database. This database, designed to facilitate access to legislation (Action plan, PM 5.1), will be available to everyone and accessible via Internet, through an integrated web portal.

The project of database creating/design is financed by the EC and UNDP which is also implementing the project. One component of the project is focused on collecting BiH legal acts translated into foreign languages, especially English, to one place.

Media will cover the start of this portal’s activities, in order to inform the public about the possibilities to access and use this database, its content and benefits they can gain from that use, for the institutions as well as for the individuals.