Croatian newspaper: Slovenia admits to "cheating" in arbitration proceedings

NEWS 23.11.201915:40
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Slovenia has admitted to its wrongdoings in the process of border arbitration with Croatia, the Zagreb-based Vecernji List reported on Saturday, quoting excerpts from a report of the Slovenian parliamentary commission for the supervision of intelligence services (KNOVS).

The daily says that the report shows that the national intelligence services participated in the attempts to conceal the impermissible communication between Slovenia’s arbitration agent Simona Drenik and arbiter Jernej Sekolec.

In 2015 Croatia walked out of the border arbitration proceedings following the release of recordings of covert contacts between Simona Drenik, then a representative of Slovenia’s Foreign Ministry, and Jernej Sekolec, Slovenia’s member of the arbitral tribunal. In July that year, it was revealed that Sekolec and Drenik, had been lobbying other arbiters to hand down a verdict in Slovenia’s favour. Since then, Croatian governments have maintained that the arbitration was irreversibly compromised and have refused to implement the subsequent ruling of the arbitral tribunal.

A part of the public segments of the KNOVS report on “intelligence and counter-intelligence activities in connection with the developments between Slovenia and Croatia before the Hague-based Arbitral Tribunal, which was recently published in Ljubljana, reveals “a series of compromising facts for the Slovenian side,” says the Croatian daily.

The report reads that the Slovenian intelligence agency (SOVA) “intensively participated in the arbitration proceedings,” with the purpose of safeguarding the (Drenik-Sekolec) communication against “interceptions” by the Croatian side and protecting the confidential communication among the members of the Slovenian arbitration team.

SOVA also instructed the arbitration team of risks of the communication in “unprotected” international lines, the daily says claiming that the Slovenia plan fell through because Drenik and Sekolec failed to stick to the instructions.