International law expert Davor Vidas told the media on Saturday the ratification of a Croatian-Bosnian border agreement was not about the solving of a burning issue, as the document had been temporarily in force since its signing in 1999, as stipulated in the agreement, so there could be no talk of an "outstanding border issue" that should be urgently "closed."
There can neither be talk about the issue of credibility which would require that the agreement be ratified now, said the director of the Law of the Sea Department at the Fridtjof Nansen Institute in Oslo.
He said the agreement stipulated that either party could unilaterally cancel it, so that even a cancellation would constitute credible behaviour, as it would comply with what was agreed.
"The basic question is only one: Whose, in accordance with the principles of the agreement both countries signed in 1999, is the tip of the Klek peninsula? It is in Croatia's interest to credibly answer that question because this is a matter of credibility, and not the ratification of an agreement in itself," said Vidas.
He said the question of whether the tip was in Croatia or not at the time of the break-up of the former Yugoslavia could not be answered by a simple or two-thirds majority in parliament but by an objective expert evaluation, because the truth could be neither voted nor imposed but established.
