Degert said this at the start of the second day of a seminar called "Accession Talks - Principle and Practice", which the European Commission organised to inform representatives of various spheres of Croatian society of the postulates of the EU and its member states.
The seminar is divided into five topics - "The Enlargement Process", "Accession Talks - From the Screening Process to the Final Outcome", "Job in the Country", "Hungary's Experience" and "The EU's Assistance in Preparations for Membership" - during which EC officials from Brussels will talks about the process of a country's joining the EU.
Present at the seminar are the director for Croatia, Turkey and information and communications policy in the Enlargement Directorate, Pierre Mirel, the head of the team for Croatia, David Daly, his deputy Henrik Bendixen, as well as Filip Cornelis from the Coordinating Team of the Enlargement Directorate.
After the presentations, participants asked questions and the one which attracted the most attention was why was one of the conditions for Croatia's joining the EU was the solving of border disputes, while Slovenia did not have to meet the same condition before joining the Block.
Mirel offered two examples to explain the situation. He recalled that Latvia and Lithuania also had disputes about the sea border before they joined the EU and that neither would have been admitted if they had not reached an agreement. He also mentioned the case of Estonia and Russia, which he said had not been solved because one was a candidate country and the other a third country.
If we had insisted on a solution, Russia, which is not an accession candidate, would have been able to block the accession of an accession candidate, said Mirel.