After Lovrin delivered a detailed speech about the implementation of judicial reform, members of the Foreign Affairs Committee and the Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs Committee asked her about the right of EU citizens to buy real estate in Croatia, restitution of property belonging to returnees, the issue of former holders of tenancy rights, and minority issues.
"There are no political obstacles for Slovene nationals wishing to buy real estate in Croatia," Lovrin said answering questions by Slovene deputies in the European Parliament Lojze Peterle and Jelko Kacin.
Lovrin said that the right of foreign nationals to buy real estate in Croatia was regulated by a law which envisaged reciprocity and that EU nationals were not being discriminated against. As for Slovenia, which last year adopted a law on the right of citizens from EU candidate- countries to buy real estate, Lovrin said this law was new in the sense that it envisaged determining reciprocity in each individual case.
"We are now discussing ways to determine reciprocity in individual cases and I repeat that there are no political obstacles to exchanging notes on that matter," Lovrin said, adding that she was familiar with the fact that requests by two Croatian nationals with permanent residence in Slovenia to buy real estate there had been approved.
Speaking of refugees' right to claim back their property, Lovrin said that Croatia had financed the reconstruction of houses from the government budget and that only three such cases remained unsolved. As for former holders of tenancy rights, she said that her government had launched a program to build flats to be rented to former tenancy rights holders.
Prompted by Kacin's statement that he would speak Croatian and that he hoped this language would soon become an official EU language, a representative from Great Britain, Charles Tannock, asked if the issue of former Yugoslav languages could be settled by using the formerly used "Serbo-Croatian" to avoid having to use a variety of languages once former Yugoslav countries joined the EU, since this would burden the EU budget.
Lovrin said that Croatian was the official language in Croatia and that she hoped that Croatian would become one of the EU's official languages once Croatia joined the bloc.