While Croatia and Slovenia argue about border fences, an older argument about borders rumbles on.
Permanent Court of Arbitration in the Hague has called on Croatia and Slovenia to give their further opinions about the legal consequences of Croatia’s point of view that the arbitration procedure for resolving their border dispute should be concluded, and has announced that it plans to hold another hearing on the matter in March next year reports HRT and Jutarnji List on December 3, 2015.
Croatia informed the Arbitral Tribunal in July that it had launched a process of termination of the Arbitration Agreement because Slovenia had been caught in material breach of its provisions. Afterwards, Croatia informed Slovenia that it was withdrawing from the Arbitration Agreement and the procedure which it considered to be irretrievably compromised.
Slovenia then sent a letter to the Court stating that it rejected Croatian “unilateral withdrawal” from the agreement, and said that the proceedings should continue and result in a ruling that would be binding for both parties.
In a statement posted on its website, Permanent Court of Arbitration said that the Arbitral Tribunal is now again fully staffed, after the resignation of former Croatian and Slovenian arbiters, since president of the Court appointed two new arbiters to that body, so they can now decide on a request by Croatia for arbitration process to be concluded. The Croatian government is expected to send further arguments about its opinion to the court by 15 January, while deadline for Slovenia is 26 February.
In the meantime, Slovenian police is conducting a preliminary investigation about possible responsibility for the whole border dispute affair of Jernej Sekolec, former Slovenian arbiter at the Court of Arbitration, with Slovenian opposition parties believing that he intentionally caused the affair which Croatia used to abandon the arbitration process.
Chairman of the Commission for the Control of Security and Intelligence Services of the Slovenian Parliament Branko Grims said he believed that Sekolec’s conduct was maybe a sabotage against Slovenia. “Sekolec is an experienced international judge, so the question is whether his actions were in negligence or something else”, he said.
The main reason for renewed doubts about Sekolec is that he first confessed he had two “electronic devices” which allegedly helped those who secretly recorded his conversations with Slovenian representative Simona Drenik. According to the Commission, he first agreed to give both computers to the Slovenian police, but later decided against it, which raised doubts that he was not only negligent, but something much worse.
Sekolec this summer resigned from his position, a few days after the media reported on the contents of his phone conversations with Simona Drenik, an official in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The recordings suggested that he had been receiving instructions from Slovenian government on a strategy to influence the other arbiters. Some members of Slovenian Parliament even believe that Sekolec was an associate of former Yugoslav secret service and that this service apparently had interest to compromise the arbitration process between Croatia and Slovenia.
