Slovenia will hire a new legal team from France in its litigation against Croatia in the arbitration dispute, which it intends to file with the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) in Luxembourg in July, the Ljubljana-based Dnevnik daily reported on Tuesday.

Slovenia will no longer be represented by the Alain Pellet law firm which represented the Slovenian government in the arbitration proceedings and provided consulting services after the arbitration ruling was delivered last year. Instead a new team of young French attorneys from the Sygna & Partners firm, established in 2004, will represent Slovenia.

Slovenia’s Prime Minister Miro Cerar selected the legal team, Dnevnik reports, which is already preparing a request for legal proceedings in Luxembourg, which could last two years.

On Monday, PM Cerar expressed his disappointment after the European Commission said that it would stay out of the Slovenia-Croatia arbitration dispute and considered this to be a politically biased stance. He announced that Slovenia would nevertheless go ahead with the lawsuit on its own.

“I expect the EU Court to consider the lawsuit responsibly, and that its ruling will state that Croatia has to immediately implement the arbitration ruling,” Cerar said on Monday in an interview with the country’s state broadcaster.

By not implementing the arbitration ruling, Croatia was violating European law and the rules of EU’s passport-free travel Schengen Area, as well as the common EU fisheries policy, he said, and added that he did not expect that the court procedure would negatively impact neither Slovenia’s general relations with Croatia with regards to economic, tourist, and other forms of cooperation that are mutually beneficial, nor the good relations between the people living on both sides of the border.

Before one member state can launch proceedings against another, it must first put a proposal to the Commission, which has three months to reply. The Commission can accept the proposal, in which case it takes over the lawsuit. If it rejects the proposal or does not reply, the member state can file a lawsuit at the CJEU.

Croatia refuted Slovenia’s complaints in a letter to the Commission on April 17. In June 2017, the Permanent Court of Arbitration delivered a ruling on the two countries’ longstanding border row.

However, in late July 2015, the Croatian parliament decided to withdraw from the arbitration agreement that the two countries had signed in 2009, and recommended bilateral negotiations as an alternative way to resolve the border dispute.

Zagreb had found the arbitration process “contaminated” after it was discovered that Slovenia’s agent Jernej Sekolec and an official in the Slovenian foreign ministry, Simona Drenik, had discussed Slovenia’s arguments in the arbitration, and lobbied with other arbiters. Sekolec and Drenik resigned from their posts as a result.

Croatia said that it had walked out of the arbitration processes due to contamination by Slovenia but that it was still open to talks on this dispute in a bilateral format or before an international legal institution.

Meanwhile, Slovenia stayed in the arbitration, and views the June 2017 ruling as final and legally binding. It views Croatia’s refusal to implement the ruling as violation of the rule of law.

On Tuesday, Cerar said that the decision by the Commission not to support Slovenia’s plan to sue Croatia was disgraceful for the EC, rather than a blow to Slovenia.

He said in an interview with a local broadcaster that the latest decision in Brussels was actually a sign of the Commission’s lack of credibility, and claimed that the EU could collapse if its executive arm kept acting in the political sense rather than on the grounds of the rule of law.

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