Slovenian president Borut Pahor said on Wednesday he did not exclude the possibility that one of the leaders of the European Commission (EC) would soon visit Ljubljana and Zagreb to discuss the border arbitration ruling, adding this can in no way be a dialogue on the border issue as a bilateral topic, but an attempt to implement the ruling.

“I’m putting in a lot of effort to ensure that the EC, as a sponsor of the arbitration ruling, which is a valid international agreement, remains a part of the negotiations on the ways to implement the ruling,” Pahor told the Slovenian press agency STA in New York, where he was attending the UN General Assembly.

Slovenia is claiming that Croatia is in breach of EU law by refusing to implement the arbitration ruling determining the land and sea borders between the two countries, which was reached in June 2017.

Croatia does not recognise the arbitration decision and has withdrawn from the process in 2015 because of a scandal which involved leaked tapes showing Slovenian government official discussing the case with the court’s judge.

According to Pahor, the border arbitration should not be approached as an open bilateral issue, but instead the focus should be on implementing the arbitration ruling, a position which is confirmed, he said, by the recently published stance of the EC legal service, which went ignored by EC President Jean-Claude Juncker until recently.

The European Commission decided in June this year it would remain neutral and will not join Slovenia in its announced lawsuit against Croatia for not implementing the arbitration’s border ruling.

Earlier in September, the German newspaper ‘Der Spiegel’ published an article, titled ‘The Juncker-Croatia Connection’, which says that the legal department of the European Commission has clearly sided with Slovenia, according to a document from May 18 this year, but that Jucker rejected their position.

The unofficial document was not included on the EC’s agenda, but all Slovenian leaders claim that the document practically confirmed that Slovenia was right to sue Croatia at the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) and that the EC should have sided with Slovenia in the lawsuit. They said the EC decided not to act because of the close political relationship between Juncker and Croatian Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic.

“I don’t want to get overemotional, perhaps this is just my personal opinion, but maybe the EC President personally, or through EC Vice-President (Frans) Timmermans, will once again try and find the way to implement this agreement, which is quite significant,” Pahor said, adding that he did not expect the possible intervention to go in the direction of bilateral dialogue with Croatia, but instead, he expected a solution to be found for the implementation of the agreement which would be acceptable to both countries.

Follow N1 via mobile apps for Android | iPhone/iPad | Windows| and social media on Twitter | Facebook.