Croatia MPs vote to quit Slovenia border row arbitration

Croatian lawmakers decided Wednesday to withdraw from arbitration on a long-running border dispute with Slovenia after revelations a Slovenian member of the international tribunal had breached its impartiality.

All 141 lawmakers present in the 151-seat Croatian parliament backed a motion obliging the government to start proceedings towards ending the arbitration because of a "key breach of its provisions by Slovenia".

"The proceedings cannot be continued... There is nothing we could do but quit," Prime Minister Zoran Milanovic told parliament during an extraordinary session held to discuss the crisis.

The panel was set up to rule on the dispute over the Piran Bay area that has dogged ties since the two neighbours became independent following the bloody break-up of Yugoslavia in 1991.

The European Union insisted that the tribunal would continue its work and called on Zagreb to meet its obligations.

The scandal erupted last week after tapped phone conversations surfaced between the tribunal's Slovenian judge Jernej Sekolec and a Ljubljana official.

In the recordings, the two openly discussed tactics for a ruling favourable to Slovenia. The pair have since resigned.

Zagreb immediately threatened to quit the tribunal and also appealed to the EU over the affair, dubbed "Pirangate" by Croatian media.

Slovenia announced Tuesday it had appointed International Court of Justice president Ronny Abraham of France to replace Sekolec, a move it said "removed all the obstacles for the tribunal to continue working undisturbed".

But Milanovic said Wednesday that Croatia would not recognise the panel's decisions even if it continued with the arbitration.

- Ruling by December -
In 2009, the two former Yugoslav republics signed an EU-backed deal to allow the arbitration tribunal to solve the dispute over 13 square kilometres (five square miles) of largely uninhabited land on the border as well as Piran Bay in the northern Adriatic.

The row blocked Croatian talks to join the EU for 10 months in 2008 before it eventually joined in 2013.

Each country was asked to propose a member of the five-strong tribunal who would have to be impartial and, therefore, should not discuss its work with their government.

Slovenia, which has just 46 kilometres of coastline, believes its access to international waters is at stake because Croatia, whose coast stretches for 1,700 kilometres, wants the border to be drawn down the middle of the disputed bay.

Earlier this month, the tribunal announced it would make a ruling by December that would be binding on both countries.

The European Commission said it expected Croatia "to stand by its commitments and continue to support the arbitration process".

"Even if the Croatian parliament voted to withdraw from the arbitration tribunal, the arbitration tribunal would remain in place and it would continue its work," spokeswoman Mina Andreeva said shortly before the vote.

The EU's executive arm "sees no viable alternative to the arbitration process and we strongly recommend Croatia to remain part of it," she said, adding that the Commission would follow developments "very closely."

But a government spokesman in Zagreb said the Commission was not competent to judge over the issue.

"It is a bilateral agreement between two equal EU member states," spokesman Nikola Jelic told AFP.