The Dayton agreement also divided the country into two highly autonomous entities, Republika Srpska, run by Serbs, and the Federation, shared by Bosniaks and Croats.

Each entity has its own government and parliament. Under the current constitution, only Serbs from the Serb-run entity can run for the Serbian seat on the state presidency, and only candidates from the Bosniak-Croat entity can fill the Croat and Bosniak seats.

In the past few years, two other cases have been brought to the European Court of Human Rights, highlighting other aspects of the constitution that discriminate against Bosnia’s own citizens.

One of the applicants is Iljaz Pilav, a Bosniak soldier and military surgeon in the town of Srebrenica during the 1992-5 war. Pilav was then a resident of Srebrenica, a historically Bosniak Muslim town that is now part of Bosnia’s Serb-run entity.

Srebrenica is known also as the place where Bosnian Serbs massacred over 8,000 Bosniak men and boys at the end of the war, an act that two international courts later classified as genocide.

Pilav also found himself ineligible to run for the state presidency; he tried twice to run for the Bosniak seat on the state presidency in 2006 and 2010, but was ruled ineligible because he was living in the Serb-led entity.

He submitted his case to the ECHR as well. In June 2016, the court ruled that Bosnia’s constitution was in violation of the European Convention’s general ban on discrimination, as Pilav would have had to relocate to the Federation entity to be eligible for office based on his ethnicity.

The most recent application, awaiting judgment from the court, comes from Svetozar Pudaric, a Serb living in the Bosniak-Croat entity. Pudaric, like Pilav, was denied the right to run for the office of the presidency in the 2018 elections because his ethnicity did not match his location.

Too late for this generation?

Zlatko Hadzidedic, a political analyst and former advisor to the Bosnian state government, says Bosnia’s internal politics have grown increasingly polarized over the past two decades and are now in a three-way gridlock.

He insisted that constitutional change in Bosnia would require the direct engagement of the international community.

Hadzidedic conceded that the political and administrative partitioning of Bosnia, brought about by the Dayton peace agreement, was a necessary compromise to end the war. It partially appeased the Serb and Croat nationalists in the country whose stated wartime goal had been to carve up Bosnia and divide it between Serbia and Croatia.

But while Bosnia commanded international attention in the 1990s, world powers have since lost interest in the still fragile country amid more pressing issues, Hadzidedic said.

“Countries with credibility, such as the US, Germany or France, could help establish a solution [to the problem of Bosnia’s constitution],” he said.

“But in the realm of geopolitics there are, in fact, only a few countries that have the perspective that a citizen state is the answer, and even fewer willing to take any concrete action,” he added.

Despite that, the Bosnians who have sued their country for discrimination say they will continue their fight for EU and world attention. Zornic says it may be too late for her, but perhaps not for future generations.

“I’m trying to fight for our grandchildren,” she says. “For my [generation], it’s too late. For our children it’s too late, but maybe it can be better for our grandchildren.”

Paul Rochford is an Independent Study Project in Journalism of the SIT Study Abroad Program Serbia, Bosnia and Kosovo: Peace and Conflict Studies in the Balkans. This story was written as an Independent Study Project in Journalism at the program’s Journalism Track.