Royal Mint
The Royal Mint is a government-owned mint that produces coins for the United Kingdom. Operating under the name Royal Mint Ltd, the mint is a limited company, wholly owned by Her Majesty's Treasury and is under an exclusive contract to supply all the nation's coinage; as well as minting circulating coins for use domestically and internationally, the mint produces planchets, commemorative coins, various types of medals and precious metal bullion. The mint exports to an average of 60 countries a year. Formed over 1,100 years ago, the mint was part of a series of mints that became centralised to produce coins for the Kingdom of England, all of Great Britain and most of the British Empire; the original London mint from which the Royal Mint is the successor, was established in 886 AD and operated within the Tower of London for 800 years before moving to what is now called Royal Mint Court where it remained until the 1960s. As Britain followed the rest of the world in decimalising its currency, the Mint moved from London to a new 38 acres plant in Llantrisant, Wales where it has remained since.
In 2009 after recommendations for the mint to be privatised the Royal Mint ceased being an executive government agency and became a state-owned company wholly owned by HM Treasury. Since the mint has expanded its business interests by reviving its bullion trade and developing a £9 million visitor centre; the history of coins in Great Britain can be traced back to the second century BC when they were introduced by Celtic tribes from across the English Channel. The first record of coins being minted in Britain is attributed to Kentish tribes such as the Cantii who around 80–60 B. C. imitated those of Marseille through casting instead of hammering. After the Romans began their invasion of Britain in AD 43, they set up mints across the land, including in London which produced Roman coins for some 40 years before closing. A mint in London reopened in 383 AD until closing swiftly as Roman rule in Britain came to an end. For the next 200 years no coins appear to have been minted in Britain until the emergence of English kingdoms in 650 AD when as many as 30 mints are recorded across Britain with one being established in London.
Control of Britain's mints alternated. In 886 AD Alfred the Great recaptured London from the Danelaw and began issuing silver pennies bearing his portrait. In 1279, the country's numerous mints were unified under a single system whereby control was centralised to the mint within the Tower of London, mints outside of London were reduced with only a few local and episcopals continuing to operate. Pipe rolls detailing the financial records of the London mint show an expenditure of £729 17s 8½d and records of timber bought for workshops. Individual roles at the mint were well established by 1464; the master-worker was charged with hiring engravers and the management of moneyers, while the mint warden was responsible for witnessing the delivery of dies. A specialist mint board was set up in 1472 to enact a 23 February indenture which vested the mint's responsibilities into three main roles. In the 16th century having suffering from the effects of the Black Death, mainland Europe was in the middle of an economic expansion, England however was suffering with financial difficulty brought on by excessive government spending.
By the 1540s wars with France and Scotland led Henry VIII to enact The Great Debasement which saw the amount of precious metal in coin reduced. In order to further gather control of the country's currency, monasteries were dissolved which ended major coin production outside of London. In 1603, the union of Scotland and England under King James VI led to a partial union of both countries' currencies, the pound Scots and the pound sterling. Due to Scotland debasing its silver coins, a Scots mark was worth just 13.5d compared to an English mark, worth 6s 8d. To bridge the difference between the values, unofficial supplementary token coins made from lead were made by unauthorised minters across the country. By 1612 there were 3,000 such unlicensed mints producing these tokens, none of whom paying anything towards the crown; the Royal Mint, not wanting to divert manpower away from minting more profitable gold and silver, hired outside agent Lord Harington who under licence started issuing copper farthings in 1613.
Private licenses to mint these coins were revoked in 1644 which led traders to resume minting their own supplementary tokens. In 1672 the Royal Mint took over the production of copper coinage. Prior to the outbreak of the English Civil War, England signed a treaty in 1630 with Spain which ensured a steady supply of silver bullion to the Tower mint. Additional branch mints to aid the one in London were set up including one at Aberystwyth Castle, in Wales. In 1642 parliament seized control of the Tower mint and after Charles I tried to arrest the Five Members he was forced to flee London, establishing at least 16 emergency mints across the British Isles in Colchester, Cork, Dublin, Salisbury, parts of Cornwall including Truro, Worcester, Carlisle, Newark and Scarborough. After raising the royal standard in Nottingham marking the beginning of the war, Charles called upon loyalist mining engineer Thomas Bushell, the owner of a mint and silver mine in Aberystwyth, to move his operations to the royalist-held Shrewsbury within in the grounds of Shrewsbury Castle.
The mint there was however short-lived, operating for no more than three months before Charles ordered Bushell to re
Meša Selimović
Mehmed "Meša" Selimović was a Yugoslav writer, whose novel Death and the Dervish is one of the most important literary works in post-Second World War Yugoslavia. Some of the main themes in his works are the relations between individuality and authority and death, other existential problems. Selimović was born to a prominent Muslim family on 26 April 1910 in Tuzla and Herzegovina, where he graduated from elementary school and high school. In 1930, he enrolled to study the Serbo-Croatian language and literature at the University of Belgrade Faculty of Philology and graduated in 1934, his lecturers included Bogdan Popović, Pavle Popović, Vladimir Ćorović, Veselin Čajkanović, Aleksandar Belić and Stjepan Kuljbakin. In 1936, he returned to Tuzla to teach in the gymnasium. At that time he participated in the Soko athletic organisation, he spent the first two years of the Second World War in Tuzla, until he was arrested for participation in the Partisan anti-fascist resistance movement in 1943. After his release, he moved to liberated territory, became a member of Communist Party of Yugoslavia and the political commissar of the Tuzla Detachment of the Partisans.
During the war, Selimović's brother a communist, was executed by partisans' firing squad for alleged theft, without trial. That episode affected Meša's contemplative introduction to Death and the Dervish, where the main protagonist Ahmed Nurudin fails to rescue his imprisoned brother. After the war, he resided in Belgrade, in 1947 he moved to Sarajevo, where he was the professor of High School of Pedagogy and Faculty of Philology, art director of Bosna Film, chief of the drama section of the National Theater, chief editor of the publishing house Svjetlost. Exasperated by a latent conflict with several local politicians and intellectuals, in 1971 he moved to Belgrade, where he lived until his death in 1982. In his 1976 letter to the Serbian Academy of Science and Arts, Selimović stated for the historical record that he regarded himself as a Serb and belonging to the corpus of Serbian literature. In his autobiography, Sjećanja, Selimović states that his paternal ancestry is from the Orthodox Christian Vujović brotherhood of the Drobnjak clan, his ancestor having converted to Islam in the 17th century for pragmatic reasons, given the presence of the Muslim Ottoman Empire in the area at the time.
Selimović was a member of Serbian Academy of Arts. Selimović began writing late in his life, his first short story was published in 1948. His first book, a collection of short stories Prva četa was published in 1950, his subsequent work, Tišine was published eleven years in 1961. The following books Tuđa zemlja and Magla i mjesečina did not receive widespread recognition either. However, his novel Death and the Dervish was received as a masterpiece; the plot of the novel takes place in 18th-century Sarajevo under Ottoman rule, reflects Selimović's own torment of the execution of his brother. Some critics have likened this novel to Kafka's The Trial, it has been translated into many languages, including English, German, Italian and Arabic. Each chapter of the novel opens with a Qur'an citation, the first being: "In the name of God, the most compassionate, the most merciful."The next novel, Tvrđava, placed still further in the past, is more optimistic, fulfilled with faith in love, unlike the lonely contemplations and fear in Death and the Dervish.
The Fortress and Death and the Dervish are the only novels of Selimović that have thus far been translated into English. Subsequent novels Ostrvo, featuring an elderly couple facing aging and eventual death on a Dalmatian island, posthumously published Krug, have not been translated into English, he wrote a book about Vuk Karadžić's orthographic reforms Za i protiv Vuka, as well as his autobiography, Sjećanja. Uvrijeđeni čovjek Prva četa Tuđa zemlja Noći i jutra Tišine Magla i mjesečina Eseji i ogledi Derviš i smrt Za i protiv Vuka Tvrđava Ostrvo Krug Sjećanja Death and the Dervish, 1996, Northwestern University Press, ISBN 0-8101-1297-3 The Fortress, 1999, Northwestern University Press, ISBN 0-8101-1713-4 Citations Death and the Dervish by Mesa Selimovic, translated by Lazar Pascanovic Mesa Selimovic in South Slavic Literature Library For and Against Vuk, study by Meša Selimović, 1967.
Peace symbols
A number of peace symbols have been used many ways in various cultures and contexts. The dove and olive branch was used symbolically by early Christians and eventually became a secular peace symbol, popularized by Pablo Picasso after World War II. In the 1950s the "peace sign", as it is known today, was designed by Gerald Holtom as the logo for the British Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, a group at the forefront of the peace movement in the UK, adopted by anti-war and counterculture activists in the US and elsewhere; the V hand signal and the peace flag became international peace symbols. The peace symbol is encoded by Unicode as part of the Miscellaneous Symbols block, at U+262E ☮ PEACE SYMBOL; the use of the olive branch as a symbol of peace in Western civilization dates at least to 5th century BC Greece. The olive branch, which the Greeks believed represented plenty and drove away evil spirits, was one of the attributes of Eirene, the Greek goddess of peace. Eirene, appeared on Roman Imperial coins with an olive branch.
The Roman poet Virgil associated "the plump olive" with Pax and he used the olive branch as a symbol of peace in his Aeneid: The Romans believed there was an intimate relationship between war and peace. Mars, the god of war, had another aspect, Mars Pacifer, Mars the bringer of Peace, shown on coins of the Roman Empire bearing an olive branch. Appian describes the use of the olive-branch as a gesture of peace by the enemies of the Roman general Scipio Aemilianus in the Numantine War and by Hasdrubal of Carthage. Poets of the 17th century associated the olive branch with peace. A Charles I gold coin of 1644 shows the monarch with olive branch. Throughout the 18th century, English coins show Britannia with a olive branch; the Old Royal Naval College, contains an allegorical painting by James Thornhill and Liberty Triumphing Over Tyranny, depicting King William III and Queen Mary enthroned in heaven with the Virtues behind them. Peace, with her doves and lambs, hands an olive branch to William, who in turn hands the cap of liberty to Europe, where absolute monarchy prevails.
Below William is the defeated French king, Louis XIV. In January 1775, the frontispiece of the London Magazine published an engraving of Peace descending on a cloud from the Temple of Commerce, bringing an olive branch to America and Britannia. In July that year, the American Continental Congress adopted the "Olive Branch Petition" in the hope of avoiding a full-blown war with Great Britain. On the Great Seal of the United States, the olive branch denotes peace, as explained by Charles Thomson, Secretary to Congress: "The Olive branch and arrows denote the power of peace & war, vested in Congress." The use of a dove as a symbol of peace originated with early Christians, who portrayed baptism accompanied by a dove on their sepulchres. The New Testament compared the dove to the Spirit of God. Christians saw Noah's Flood; the First Epistle of Peter said that the Flood, which brought salvation through water, prefigured baptism. Tertullian compared the dove, who "announced to the world the assuagement of divine wrath, when she had been sent out of the ark and returned with the olive branch", to the Holy Spirit who descends in baptism in the form of a dove that brings the peace of God, sent out from the heavens".
At first the dove represented the subjective personal experience of peace, the peace of the soul, in the earliest Christian art it accompanies baptism. By the end of the second century it represented social and political peace, "peace unto the nations", from the third century it began to appear in depictions of conflict, such as Noah and the Ark and the lions, the three young men in the furnace, Susannah and the Elders; the dove appears in Christian inscriptions in the Roman catacombs, sometimes accompanied by the words in pace. For example, in the Catacomb of Callixtus, a dove and branch are drawn next to a Latin inscription NICELLA VIRCO DEI OVE VI XIT ANNOS P M XXXV DE POSITA XV KAL MAIAS BENE MERENTI IN PACE, meaning "Nicella, God's virgin, who lived for more or less 35 years, she was placed 15 days before the Kalends of May. For the well deserving one in peace." In another example, a shallow relief sculpture shows a dove with a branch flying to a figure marked in Greek as ΕΙΡΗΝΗ. The symbol has been found in the Christian catacombs of Sousse, which date from the end of the first century AD.
The Christian symbolism of the olive branch, invariably carried by the dove, derives from Greek usage and the story of Noah in the Hebrew Bible. The story of Noah ends with a dove bringing a freshly plucked olive leaf, a sign of life after the Flood and of God's bringing Noah, his family and the animals to land. Rabbinic literature interpreted the olive leaf as "the young shoots of the Land of Israel" or the dove's preference for bitter food in God's service, rather than sweet food in the service of men, and neither represented peace in Jewish thought, but the dove and olive branch acquired that meaning in Christianity. Before the Peace of Constantine, in which Rome ceased its persecution of Christians following Constantine's conversion, Noah was shown in an attitude of prayer, a dove flying toward him or alighting on his outstretched hand. According to Graydon Snyder, "The Noah story afforded the early Christian community an oppo
Deutsche Mark
The Deutsche Mark, abbreviated "DM" or "D-Mark", was the official currency of West Germany from 1948 until 1990 and the unified Germany from 1990 until 2002. It was first issued under Allied occupation in 1948 to replace the Reichsmark, served as the Federal Republic of Germany's official currency from its founding the following year until the adoption of the euro. In English it is called the "Deutschmark"; the Germans called it D-Mark when referring to the currency, Mark when talking about individual sums. In 1999, the Deutsche Mark was replaced by the Euro; the Deutsche Mark ceased to be legal tender upon the introduction of the euro — in contrast to the other eurozone nations, where the euro and legacy currency circulated side by side for up to two months. Mark coins and banknotes continued to be accepted as valid forms of payment in Germany until 28 February 2002; the Deutsche Bundesbank has guaranteed that all German marks in cash form may be changed into euros indefinitely, one may do so in person at any branch of the Bundesbank in Germany.
Banknotes and coins can be sent to the Bundesbank by mail. In 2012, it was estimated that as many as 13.2 billion marks were in circulation, with one poll showing a narrow majority of Germans favouring the currency's restoration. On 31 December 1998, the Council of the European Union fixed the irrevocable exchange rate, effective 1 January 1999, for German mark to euros as DM 1.95583 = €1. One Deutsche Mark was divided into 100 Pfennige. A mark had been the currency of Germany since its original unification in 1871. Before that time, the different German states issued a variety of different currencies, though most were linked to the Vereinsthaler, a silver coin containing 16 2⁄3 grams of pure silver. Although the mark was based on gold rather than silver, a fixed exchange rate between the Vereinsthaler and the mark of 3 marks = 1 Vereinsthaler was used for the conversion; the first mark, known as the Goldmark, was introduced in 1873. With the outbreak of World War I, the mark was taken off the gold standard.
The currency thus became known as the Papiermark as high inflation hyperinflation occurred and the currency became made up of paper money. The Papiermark was replaced by the Rentenmark from November 15, 1923, the Reichsmark in 1924. During the first two years of occupation the occupying powers of France, United Kingdom, United States, the Soviet Union were not able to negotiate a possible currency reform in Germany. Due to the strains between the Allies each zone was governed independently as regards monetary matters; the US occupation policy was governed by the directive JCS 1067, which forbade the US military governor "to take any steps to strengthen German financial structure". As a consequence a separate monetary reform in the U. S. zone was not possible. Each of the Allies printed its own occupation currency; the Deutsche Mark was introduced on Sunday, June 20, 1948 by Ludwig Erhard. The old Reichsmark and Rentenmark were exchanged for the new currency at a rate of DM 1 = RM 1 for the essential currency such as wages, payment of rents etc. and DM 1 = RM 10 for the remainder in private non-bank credit balances, with half frozen.
Large amounts were exchanged for RM 10 to 65 Pfennig. In addition, each person received a per capita allowance of DM 60 in two parts, the first being DM 40 and the second DM 20. A few weeks Erhard, acting against orders, issued an edict abolishing many economic controls, implemented by the Nazis, which the Allies had not removed, he did this, as he confessed, on Sunday because the offices of the American and French occupation authorities were closed that day. He was sure; the introduction of the new currency was intended to protect western Germany from a second wave of hyperinflation and to stop the rampant barter and black market trade. Although the new currency was only distributed in the three western occupation zones outside Berlin, the move angered the Soviet authorities, who regarded it as a threat; the Soviets promptly cut off all road and canal links between the three western zones and West Berlin, starting the Berlin Blockade. In response, the U. S. and Britain launched an airlift of food and coal and distributed the new currency in West Berlin as well.
Since the 1930s, prices and wages had been controlled. That meant that people had accumulated large paper assets, that official prices and wages did not reflect reality, as the black market dominated the economy and more than half of all transactions were taking place unofficially; the reform replaced the old money with the new Deutsche Mark at the rate of one new per ten old. This wiped out 90% of government and private debt, as well as private savings. Prices were decontrolled, labor unions agreed to accept a 15% wage increase, despite the 25% rise in prices; the result was the prices of German export products held steady, while profits and earnings from exports soared and were poured back into the economy. The currency reforms were simultaneous with the $1.4 billion in Marshall Plan money coming in from the United States, used for investment. In addition, the Marshall plan forced German companies, as well as those in all of Western Europe, to moder
Obverse and reverse
Obverse and its opposite, refer to the two flat faces of coins and some other two-sided objects, including paper money, seals, drawings, old master prints and other works of art, printed fabrics. In this usage, obverse reverse means the back face; the obverse of a coin is called heads, because it depicts the head of a prominent person, the reverse tails. In fields of scholarship outside numismatics, the term front is more used than obverse, while usage of reverse is widespread; the equivalent terms used in codicology, manuscript studies, print studies and publishing are "recto" and "verso". The side of a coin with the larger-scale image will be called the obverse and, if that does not serve to distinguish them, the side, more typical of a wide range of coins from that location will be called the obverse. Following this principle, in the most famous of ancient Greek coins, the tetradrachm of Athens, the obverse is the head of Athena and the reverse is her owl. Similar versions of these two images, both symbols of the state, were used on the Athenian coins for more than two centuries.
In the many republics of ancient Greece, such as Athens or Corinth, one side of their coins would have a symbol of the state their patron goddess or her symbol, which remained constant through all of the coins minted by that state, regarded as the obverse of those coins. The opposite side may have varied from time to time. In ancient Greek monarchical coinage, the situation continued whereby a larger image of a deity, is called the obverse, but a smaller image of a monarch appears on the other side, called the reverse. In a Western monarchy, it has been customary, following the tradition of the Hellenistic monarchs and the Roman emperors, for the currency to bear the head of the monarch on one side, always regarded as the obverse; this change happened in the coinage of Alexander the Great, which continued to be minted long after his death. After his conquest of ancient Egypt, he allowed himself to be depicted on the obverse of coins as a god-king, at least because he thought this would help secure the allegiance of the Egyptians, who had regarded their previous monarchs, the pharaohs, as divine.
The various Hellenistic rulers who were his successors followed his tradition and kept their images on the obverse of coins. A movement back to the earlier tradition of a deity being placed on the obverse occurred in Byzantine coinage, where a head of Christ became the obverse and a head or portrait of the emperor became considered the reverse; the introduction of this style in the gold coins of Justinian II from the year 695 provoked the Islamic Caliph, Abd al-Malik, who had copied Byzantine designs, replacing Christian symbols with Islamic equivalents to develop a distinctive Islamic style, with just lettering on both sides of their coins. This script alone style was used on nearly all Islamic coinage until the modern period; the type of Justinian II was revived after the end of Iconoclasm, with variations remained the norm until the end of the Empire. Without images, therefore, it is not always easy to tell which side will be regarded as the obverse without some knowledge. After 695 Islamic coins avoided all images of persons and contained script alone.
The side expressing the Six Kalimas is defined as the obverse. A convention exists to display the obverse to the left and the reverse to the right in photographs and museum displays, but this is not invariably observed; the form of currency follows its function, to serve as a accepted medium of exchange of value. This function rests on a state as guarantor of the value: either as trustworthy guarantor of the kind and amount of metal in a coin, or as powerful guarantor of the continuing acceptance of token coins. Traditionally, most states have been monarchies where the person of the monarch and the state were equivalent for most purposes. For this reason, the obverse side of a modern piece of currency is the one that evokes that reaction by invoking the strength of the state, that side always depicts a symbol of the state, whether it be the monarch or otherwise. If not provided for on the obverse, the reverse side contains information relating to a coin's role as medium of exchange. Additional space reflects the issuing country's culture or government, or evokes some aspect of the state's territory.
Regarding the euro, some confusion regarding the obverse and reverse of the euro coins exists. As agreed by the informal Economic and Finance Ministers Council of Verona in April 1996, despite the fact that a number of countries have a different design for each coin, the distinctive national side for the circulation coins is the obverse and the common European side is the reverse; this rule does not apply to the collector coins. A number of the designs used for obverse national sides of euro coins were taken from the reverse of the nations' former pre-euro coins. Several countries continue to use portraits of the reigning monarch. In Japan, from 1897 to the end of World War II, the following informal conventions existed: the Chrysanthemum Throne, representing the imperial family, appeared on all coins, this side was regarded as the obverse; the Chrys
Dayton Agreement
The General Framework Agreement for Peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina known as the Dayton Agreement, Dayton Accords, Paris Protocol or Dayton–Paris Agreement, is the peace agreement reached at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, United States, on 1 November 1995, formally signed in Paris, France, on 14 December 1995. These accords put an end to the 3 1⁄2 - one of the Yugoslav Wars. Though basic elements of the Dayton Agreement were proposed in international talks as early as 1992, these negotiations were initiated following the unsuccessful previous peace efforts and arrangements, the August 1995 Croatian military Operation Storm and its aftermath, the government military offensive against the Republika Srpska, conducted in parallel with NATO's Operation Deliberate Force. During September and October 1995, world powers, gathered in the Contact Group, applied intense pressure to the leaders of the three sides to attend the negotiations in Dayton, Ohio; the conference took place from 1–21 November 1995.
The main participants from the region were the President of the Republic of Serbia Slobodan Milošević, President of Croatia Franjo Tuđman, President of Bosnia and Herzegovina Alija Izetbegović with his Foreign Minister Muhamed Šaćirbeg. The peace conference was led by US Secretary of State Warren Christopher, negotiator Richard Holbrooke with two Co-Chairmen in the form of EU Special Representative Carl Bildt and the First Deputy Foreign Minister of Russia Igor Ivanov. A key participant in the US delegation was General Wesley Clark; the head of the UK's team was Pauline Neville-Jones, political director of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. The UK military representative was Col Arundell David Leakey. Paul Williams, through the Public International Law & Policy Group served as legal counsel to the Bosnian Government delegation during the negotiations; the secure site was chosen in order to remove all the parties from their comfort zone, without which they would have little incentive to negotiate.
Curbing the participants' ability to negotiate via the media was a important consideration. Richard Holbrooke wanted to prevent posturing through early leaks to the press. After having been initiated in Dayton, Ohio, on 21 November 1995, the full and formal agreement was signed in Paris on 14 December 1995 and witnessed by Spanish Prime Minister Felipe Gonzalez, French President Jacques Chirac, U. S. President Bill Clinton, UK Prime Minister John Major, German Chancellor Helmut Kohl and Russian Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin; the agreement's main purpose is to promote peace and stability in Bosnia and Herzegovina and to endorse regional balance in and around the former Yugoslavia, thus in a regional perspective. The present political divisions of Bosnia and Herzegovina and its structure of government were agreed upon, as part the constitution that makes up Annex 4 of the General Framework Agreement concluded at Dayton. A key component of this was the delineation of the Inter-Entity Boundary Line to which many of the tasks listed in the Annexes referred.
The State of Bosnia Herzegovina was set as of the Federation of Bosnia-Herzegovina and of the Republika Srpska. Bosnia and Herzegovina is a complete state, as opposed to a confederation. Although decentralised in its entities, it would still retain a central government, with a rotating State Presidency, a central bank and a constitutional court; the agreement mandated a wide range of international organizations to monitor and implement components of the agreement. The NATO-led IFOR was responsible for implementing military aspects of the agreement and deployed on 20 December 1995, taking over the forces of the UNPROFOR; the Office of the High Representative was charged with the task of civil implementation. The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe was charged with organising the first free elections in 1996. On 13 October 1997, the Croatian 1861 Law Party and the Bosnia-Herzegovina 1861 Law Party requested the Constitutional Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina to annul several decisions and to confirm one decision of the Supreme Court of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina and, more to review the constitutionality of the General Framework Agreement for Peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina since it was alleged that the agreement violated the Constitution of Bosnia and Herzegovina in a way that it undermined the integrity of the state and could cause the dissolution of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The Court reached the conclusion that it is not competent to decide the dispute in regards to the mentioned decisions since the applicants were not subjects that were identified in Article VI.3 of the Constitution on those who can refer disputes to the Court. The Court rejected the other request: the Constitutional Court is not competent to evaluate the constitutionality of the General Framework Agreement as the Constitutional Court has in fact been established under the Constitution of Bosnia and Herzegovina in order to uphold this Constitution The Constitution of Bosnia and Herzegovina was adopted as Annex IV to the General Framework Agreement for Peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina, there cannot be a conflict or a possibility
Euro
The euro is the official currency of 19 of the 28 member states of the European Union. This group of states is known as the eurozone or euro area, counts about 343 million citizens as of 2019; the euro is the second largest and second most traded currency in the foreign exchange market after the United States dollar. The euro is subdivided into 100 cents; the currency is used by the institutions of the European Union, by four European microstates that are not EU members, as well as unilaterally by Montenegro and Kosovo. Outside Europe, a number of special territories of EU members use the euro as their currency. Additionally, 240 million people worldwide as of 2018 use currencies pegged to the euro; the euro is the second largest reserve currency as well as the second most traded currency in the world after the United States dollar. As of August 2018, with more than €1.2 trillion in circulation, the euro has one of the highest combined values of banknotes and coins in circulation in the world, having surpassed the U.
S. dollar. The name euro was adopted on 16 December 1995 in Madrid; the euro was introduced to world financial markets as an accounting currency on 1 January 1999, replacing the former European Currency Unit at a ratio of 1:1. Physical euro coins and banknotes entered into circulation on 1 January 2002, making it the day-to-day operating currency of its original members, by March 2002 it had replaced the former currencies. While the euro dropped subsequently to US$0.83 within two years, it has traded above the U. S. dollar since the end of 2002, peaking at US$1.60 on 18 July 2008. In late 2009, the euro became immersed in the European sovereign-debt crisis, which led to the creation of the European Financial Stability Facility as well as other reforms aimed at stabilising and strengthening the currency; the euro is managed and administered by the Frankfurt-based European Central Bank and the Eurosystem. As an independent central bank, the ECB has sole authority to set monetary policy; the Eurosystem participates in the printing and distribution of notes and coins in all member states, the operation of the eurozone payment systems.
The 1992 Maastricht Treaty obliges most EU member states to adopt the euro upon meeting certain monetary and budgetary convergence criteria, although not all states have done so. The United Kingdom and Denmark negotiated exemptions, while Sweden turned down the euro in a 2003 referendum, has circumvented the obligation to adopt the euro by not meeting the monetary and budgetary requirements. All nations that have joined the EU since 1993 have pledged to adopt the euro in due course. Since 1 January 2002, the national central banks and the ECB have issued euro banknotes on a joint basis. Euro banknotes do not show. Eurosystem NCBs are required to accept euro banknotes put into circulation by other Eurosystem members and these banknotes are not repatriated; the ECB issues 8% of the total value of banknotes issued by the Eurosystem. In practice, the ECB's banknotes are put into circulation by the NCBs, thereby incurring matching liabilities vis-à-vis the ECB; these liabilities carry interest at the main refinancing rate of the ECB.
The other 92% of euro banknotes are issued by the NCBs in proportion to their respective shares of the ECB capital key, calculated using national share of European Union population and national share of EU GDP weighted. The euro is divided into 100 cents. In Community legislative acts the plural forms of euro and cent are spelled without the s, notwithstanding normal English usage. Otherwise, normal English plurals are sometimes used, with many local variations such as centime in France. All circulating coins have a common side showing the denomination or value, a map in the background. Due to the linguistic plurality in the European Union, the Latin alphabet version of euro is used and Arabic numerals. For the denominations except the 1-, 2- and 5-cent coins, the map only showed the 15 member states which were members when the euro was introduced. Beginning in 2007 or 2008 the old map is being replaced by a map of Europe showing countries outside the Union like Norway, Belarus, Russia or Turkey.
The 1-, 2- and 5-cent coins, keep their old design, showing a geographical map of Europe with the 15 member states of 2002 raised somewhat above the rest of the map. All common sides were designed by Luc Luycx; the coins have a national side showing an image chosen by the country that issued the coin. Euro coins from any member state may be used in any nation that has adopted the euro; the coins are issued in denominations of €2, €1, 50c, 20c, 10c, 5c, 2c, 1c. To avoid the use of the two smallest coins, some cash transactions are rounded to the nearest five cents in the Netherlands and Ireland and in Finland; this practice is discouraged by the Commission, as is the practice of certain shops of refusing to accept high-value euro notes. Commemorative coins with €2 face value have been issued with changes to the design of the national side of the coin; these include both issued coins, such as the €2 commemorative coin for the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Rome, nationally i
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