"The agreement between Drnovsek and Racan is a fact of international law. It was confirmed on the same day by the Slovene and Croatian governments, and initialled by representatives authorised by the two governments. In that agreement, Slovenia and Croatia confirm the fact that the sea border is not the middle line (in Piran Bay) and that Slovenia has access to the open sea," Rupel says in the text, which is also his response to a commentary in Delo paper which notes that by declaring the ecological zone and the continental shelf the Slovene parliament has annulled the 2001 agreement between Drnovsek and Racan and caused nationalist tensions in both countries.
Rupel claims in his reply that declaration of the continental shelf does not affect the validity of the agreement between Drnovsek and Racan.
"That agreement refers to the territorial waters, while the protected ecological zone is outside the Slovene territorial waters," he says.
Rupel goes on to say that by initialling the 2001 agreement Croatia confirmed that Slovenia's territorial waters border on international waters and that this week Slovenia acted in line with that fact and declared its own shelf outside its territorial waters.
The Slovene Foreign Ministry also carried Rupel's statement in a Slovene TV broadcast on Tuesday evening, when he defended Slovenia's right to declare a protected ecological zone and a continental shelf.
Rupel said then that the actual problem regarding the sea border dispute between Slovenia and Croatia was Croatia's insistence on "ruling the Adriatic" and its "hegemonist" behaviour.
"I believe there is no sense in Croatia making its path to Europe more difficult with such ambitions," said Rupel, who has frequently claimed that Croatia and Slovenia should "divide the undivided Yugoslav sea" and that it would not be possible to say what belonged to Croatia and what to Slovenia until a bilateral agreement on the sea border was signed.