The European Commission (EC) is not under legal obligation to take a stand on Slovenia's lawsuit against Croatia over their border arbitration dispute, said Margaritis Schinas, spokesman for the EC, on Monday in Brussels.

Schinas said that the EC does not comment on its internal documents, which includes a document in which EC’s legal experts reportedly established that Croatia violated EU laws by refusing to accept the 2017 ruling.

The issue came back to the limelight, primarily in Slovenia, after the German Der Spiegel weekly published an article which said that EC President Jean-Claude Juncker did not want to become involved in the sea border dispute between the two countries, even though the EC legal experts believed that Slovenia was right to insist on the implementation on the ruling.

“Article 259 does not create legal obligation for the EC to issue a report… in four out of eight cases in which Article 259 was invoked, the Commission did not take a stand,” Schinas said.

Article 259 of the Lisbon Treaty states that a EU member state may bring forward a lawsuit against another member before the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) in case of an alleged infringement of an obligation.

In June this year, the three-month deadline expired for the European Commission to issue its stance on Slovenia’s announcement that it would sue Croatia at the CJEU. In its decision, the EC refused to take a stance on the matter, and opted to remain a neutral observer and a mediator.

Slovenia has in July filed a lawsuit against Croatia over its refusal to implement the arbitration border ruling which determined the land and sea border between the two countries in 2017.

Croatia does not recognise the ruling, and has has withdrawn from the process in 2015 after tapes surfaced showing Slovenian government official discussing the case with the court’s judge.

“The college (of commissioners) did discuss the matter on 4 July following the presentation of the case by the director-general of the legal service of the Commission,” Schinas said.

“I’ve also have said that we never comment on internal EC documents, especially when there are many of them,” he said in response to Slovenian reporters’ questions as to why the Commission and its president Jean-Claude Juncker ignored the opinion of the Commission’s legal service and why that position had not been discussed at that college.

Asked by Slovenian reporters if there were any chances for the college of commissioners to reconsider the matter, as hinted by Commissioner Violeta Bulc of Slovenia, the Commission’s spokesman answered in the negative.

The Croatian government said on Saturday that the EC was right to not interfere in the border dispute.

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