What a legal rule said on a given date, in Bosnia and Herzegovina

The idea

Give the system a rule, a date and a jurisdiction. Get back the text that applied then, the act and the gazette issue it came from, and the date we retrieved it.

That is a dated, sourced lookup: the same shape of claim the product already makes about a business, pointed at legal text. It is the pilot, not the point.

The point is the worked example below - somebody with a real case who needs to know what applies to them. The step from a text lookup to a usable answer is not a chatbot. It is naming, precisely, which documents and which facts the answer is still missing.

The one strong finding

Bosnia and Herzegovina has an official grammar of law, and it supports the central modelling assumption directly.

Jedinstvena pravila za izradu pravnih propisa u institucijama BiH are the drafting rules binding state institutions. They require:

• Article 16 - the final part of a regulation states when it enters into force and, separately, the initial period of its application.
• Article 21(2) - a law normally enters into force eight days after publication, and never earlier than one day after.
• Article 21(3) - the form of words for a gap between the two: "Ovaj propis stupa na snagu ______ dana od dana objave, a primjenjivat će se od ______ godine."
• Article 19 - limits by place and by time.
• Article 18 - for proceedings not finally concluded when a new rule enters into force: either a deadline after which the new rule applies, or the standard sentence keeping them under the old regime.
• Article 20 - a repeal provision must clearly name every regulation it repeals.
• Article 22 - for laws, where no date is marked, the date of the gazette issue counts.

Article 21(3) is the one to keep. It is primary-source evidence that "in force" and "applicable" are two different dates in Bosnian drafting practice, with an official sentence for stating both. A model carrying one date per act is not simplifying; it is in conflict with Article 16.

It also gives the work a target that can fail. For any act, these rules say what must be present. A parser can be measured on whether it found it, and a miss is a real miss.

One limit, stated rather than buried: these rules bind state institutions. The Federation, Republika Srpska, Brčko and the ten cantons have their own drafting rules, and those have not been checked.

Four findings that argue against the ambitious version

The unit of publication is the issue, not the law

Laws are published inside numbered gazette issues. Republika Srpska's publisher says so, and sells a separate product, Dikta, whose job is to tell you which issue a given law appears in. The existence of that product is the evidence.

So there is no official, stable address for one version of one law. "The text of Article 47 as it stood in June 2023" is not a lookup against any official source. It is a reconstruction from a base act plus every amending issue, in order.

A consolidated text is usually not law

For BiH institutions a consolidated text is not a regulation. It is not published in the official gazette, it does not enter into force, and it cannot be cited in official procedure. It is a working aid.

The Federal Tax Administration publishes a consolidated Labour Law whose header reads "prečišćena neslužbena verzija" - an unofficial version of a law that same administration enforces. The label is honest. It also means the line between official and unofficial does not run where a reader expects.

The document most useful to a reader is exactly the one carrying no authority. A system serving it without saying so is misleading its user about the only thing that matters.

Brčko is the exception that breaks the schema

In Brčko District, consolidated texts are established by the Assembly's Legislative Commission and published in the Official Gazette with a citation of their own.

So the same phrase means an authoritative act in one place and a convenience in another. A field called consolidated: true would erase the difference. What has to be recorded is who consolidated it, and under what authority.

Nothing found offers machine access

No API. No bulk download. No documented export. No open-data endpoint. Not at any source surveyed.

Republika Srpska is subscription-gated. The state and Federation publisher is partly subscription-gated. The Federation government's register is free and its rows link to the documents themselves, but it is thirty-one separate pages, one per year, with nothing indexing across them and nothing gathering an act's amendments into one place. The case-law portal renders client-side and serves an empty page to a plain HTTP client.

Five of the URLs attempted returned 403 or 404, and one official portal's own quick-link to the judicial documentation centre is misspelled. A small sample, and already enough to say that broken links here are the normal condition.

The worked example

Somebody asked, during a conversation about this project: a mother of three wants to know how many days of annual leave she is entitled to.

Following it through the Labour Law of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina

• the unofficial consolidation of Službene novine FBiH 26/16 and 89/18, quoted

from the PDF cited below:

• Article 47(1) fixes a floor of 20 working days, and provides that leave may run longer than 30 where a collective agreement so provides: *"Izuzetno godišnji odmor može da traje i duže od 30 radnih dana, ukoliko je to uređeno kolektivnim ugovorom, a prema prirodi posla i uvjetima rada."* The article is headed Minimalni godišnji odmor - minimum annual leave.
• Article 47(2) - a worker under 18: at least 24 working days.
• Article 48 - when the right is acquired at all: after six months of continuous work for a first job, or after a break longer than 15 days. Otherwise at least one day per completed month.
• Article 49(1) - any duration above the statutory minimum is set by a collective agreement, an employer rulebook, or the contract of employment.
• Article 51 - she cannot give it up.

The number is not in the statute, and the statute says so itself. It fixes a floor, allows a collective agreement to go past 30, and names three documents that decide the rest. None of the three is in any gazette. The contract is not public at all. And before any of that, jurisdiction changes the act entirely: in Republika Srpska or Brčko this is a different law.

What a system can honestly return

Three parts, and every one of them comes from text that was actually fetched:

• The bound the statute fixes. At least 20 working days. At least 24 if she is under 18. More than 30 only where a collective agreement so provides. Cited to Article 47, in the version that applied on the date in question.
• The named documents that would resolve the rest - which collective agreement binds her employer, that employer's pravilnik o radu, her ugovor o radu - each with where it would have to come from, and whether it is public at all.
• The facts the question did not supply, and which of them change the answer: jurisdiction, sector, employer, length of service, age. Whether three children changes the figure is one of these. Nothing in Articles 47 to 52 makes it relevant; a collective agreement may.

Naming what is missing is an answer. It is the answer a competent person gives, it is checkable in a way a number is not, and it is what the engine built under this project returns.

Republication

Article 8(1)(b) of Zakon o autorskom pravu i srodnim pravima u BiH places *službeni tekstovi iz područja zakonodavstva, uprave i pravosuđa* - laws, regulations, decisions, reports, minutes, court decisions - outside copyright altogether. The text of an act may be reproduced.

The constraint that does bite is the database maker's right: Articles 143 and 146 protect a collection for fifteen years, renewed by every substantial update, even where every document in it is free. So taking a publisher's holdings in bulk is out, and a corpus has to be built by people entering provisions one at a time. Unofficial consolidations and translations sit outside Article 8 as well.

The provisions, quoted: May Bosnian legal text be republished?

What the survey supports

• Two independent time dimensions, with a primary source behind them rather than an intuition.
• Jurisdiction as part of the question, not metadata attached afterwards.
• Provenance with authority recorded, rather than a consolidated flag.
• A blocked source recorded as blocked, because being blocked is common.
• A narrow target that can fail: does a parser find what the drafting rules require an act to state?
• An answer shaped as a bound plus a named list of missing documents and missing facts, rather than a value.

What it does not support

• Answering a citizen's practical question with a single number, or with a range presented as final.
• Anything that depends on bulk or machine access to official sources.
• Treating "the current text of the law" as something you can fetch. Outside Brčko, officially, it is not.
• Nationwide coverage in any form. Ten cantons and the municipal level were not surveyed at all.

Status

The survey stands as written. Three things have been built since:

• A first working version of the legal engine - seven articles of the Labour Law, seven of the drafting rules, six example questions, and a refusal to place any text in time.
• The reading bench - the engine behind a form, holding no law and storing nothing.
• The register - 769 acts of Brčko District and the Federation of BiH, 1747 gazette entries, citations only. A demo.

No text has been ingested in bulk, no legal database exists, and no pilot has been approved. This is still a proposal and a survey, published at the stage where it is cheap to abandon.

Sources

Every source below was retrieved on the date shown. A source read in March and the same source read in September are not necessarily the same document.

1. Jedinstvena pravila za izradu pravnih propisa u institucijama BiH, Službeni glasnik BiH 11/05 (amended 58/14, 60/14, 50/17)Retrieved 15 September 2026Copy hosted by the Indirect Taxation Authority; text extracted locally from the PDF
2. JP NIO Službeni list BiHRetrieved 15 September 2026Publishes Službeni glasnik BiH, Službene novine FBiH and Službene novine KS; carries login and subscriber benefits
3. JU Službeni glasnik Republike SrpskeRetrieved 15 September 2026Subscription; e-RP register of regulations and the Dikta register of which issue a law appears in
4. Vlada Federacije BiH, registers of laws by yearRetrieved 16 September 2026Thirty-one chronological registers, 1996 to 2026; free, no registration, and each row links to the document itself
5. Skupština Brčko distrikta BiH, lawsRetrieved 15 September 2026Roughly 200 district laws, free, no registration barrier evident
6. Ustavni sud Bosne i Hercegovine, decisionsRetrieved 15 September 2026Searchable by content, case number, keyword, date and by challenged act
7. Zakon o radu Federacije BiH, unofficial consolidated PDF published by the Federal Tax AdministrationRetrieved 15 September 2026Consolidation of Službene novine FBiH 26/16 and 89/18; header reads "prečišćena neslužbena verzija". Re-fetched and Articles 47 to 52 re-extracted and quoted verbatim for the correction below
8. Federalni zavod PIO, list of regulationsRetrieved 15 September 2026Lists Zakon o PIO FBiH with gazette numbers 13/18, 90/21, 19/22, 47/24, 19/25, 06/26 and Constitutional Court decisions among the regulations
9. Advokatska kancelarija Prnjavorac, laws of the Federation of BiHRetrieved 15 September 2026Private collection, free, texts labelled "neslužbeni prečišćeni tekst" where unofficial
10. Portal pravosudje.baRetrieved 15 September 2026Judicial portal; links to the case-law portal and the Centar za sudsku dokumentaciju

Corrections

This article was changed after publication. It keeps its address and its identity; what follows is what changed and when.

• 16 September 2026The survey was wrong about the Federation government's register in two places, and reading the whole of it is what showed that. It recorded "chronological registers 2019 to 2026": there are thirty-one, 1996 to 2026. It said that register carries no texts at all: 1096 of its rows link to the document itself, checked by fetching them. Both are corrected where they were stated, and the Status section now names what the register here holds - 769 acts, Brčko District and the Federation. No conclusion of the survey changes: the Federation still publishes nothing that gathers an act's amendments into one place, which is the finding the proposal rests on.
• 16 September 2026Added an orientation line at the top naming the question this article answers, and pointed it at the question box at /labs/ask, which did not exist when this was written. No claim, source, date or commitment was changed, added or removed.
• 15 September 2026Rewritten for clarity. Two sections argued with earlier versions of themselves in the text ("this section used to say", "an earlier version concluded"). Both now state the finding once and stop; the record of what changed stays here, where it belongs. The Status section was updated: a register of 199 Brčko acts has been built and published as a demo. No source, quotation, citation or conclusion was changed.
• 15 September 2026"The question that decides everything" said nobody had established whether this material may be republished, and called it the one constraint that could not be worked around. It had not been researched. Article 8(1)(b) of Zakon o autorskom pravu i srodnim pravima u BiH (Sl. glasnik BiH 63/10) places official texts of legislation, administration and justice outside copyright entirely. The section is rewritten, and the separate constraint it was concealing - the database maker's right in Articles 143 and 146, which does reach a collection - is now stated in its place. Working through it: "The question that decides everything has an answer".
• 15 September 2026Article 47 of the FBiH Labour Law was reported as a minimum of 20 and a maximum of 30 working days, and the worked example concluded "between 20 and 30". Article 47(1) of the same cited PDF also provides that leave may exceed 30 working days where a collective agreement so provides, given the nature of the work and working conditions; the article is headed "Minimalni godišnji odmor". The provision was re-fetched and quoted verbatim, the ceiling corrected, and the worked example rewritten: what the statute fixes is a floor, a conditional ceiling, and the instruments that decide the rest.
• 15 September 2026Rewritten in plainer English, and the Status section corrected. It said "nothing has been built"; a first version of the engine now exists and is described in a separate update. No source, citation, date or conclusion of the survey was changed.