in dissent with the agreement which would have excluded him from acceding to power again. The SDA also opposed it, as it would have created a further asymmetry, with one Presidency member (from Republika Srpska) elected directly, and two elected indirectly. In February 2013, the European Commission decided to step up its involvement, with the direct facilitation of talks by Füle, in coordination with the Council of Europe's secretary-general Thorbjørn Jagland. In March and April 2013, with the support of the Director-General for Enlargement Stefano Sannino, the EU Delegation in Sarajevo facilitated a series of direct talks between party leaders, but with no concrete outcome. During the summer of 2013, Čović and Bosnian Presidency member Bakir Izetbegović reached a political agreement on several files, from Mostar to Sejdić–Finci, in parallel to the initiative led by the U.S. Embassy for a constitutional reform of the Federal entity. An agreement on principles on how to solve the Sejdić–Finci issue was signed by political leaders in Brussels on 1 October 2013, but it evaporated right after. Three further rounds of negotiations among political leaders were led together with Füle, in a castle near Prague in November 2013, and later in Sarajevo in the first months of 2014, also with the presence of the U.S. and the Venice Commission. Despite high hopes, a solution could not be found, as the HDZ BiH required the absolute arithmetical certainty of being able to occupy the third seat of the Bosnian Presidency – which, given that the Sejdić–Finci ruling was actually about removing ethnic discrimination in the access to the same Presidency, could not be provided by any possible model. Talks were ended on 17 February 2014, while popular protests were ongoing in Sarajevo and in the rest of the country. Entity-level constitutional reforms Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina The Constitution of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina has been amended over 109 times since its adoption, mainly via impositions of the High Representative to ensure compliance with the decisions of the Constitutional Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina. No consolidated version has been adopted by the Federal Parliament so far. In parallel to EU-facilitated talks on the Sejdić-Finci issue at State level, in February 2013, the U.S. Embassy supported an expert working group which presented its 188 recommendations to the Federal House of Representatives, aiming to address the costly and complex governance structures with overlapping competences between