The ball is certainly not in the Slovenian court, we have not brought the prejudging of the border issue in the negotiations," the premier Pahor said answering a question about how to solve an impasse in the negotiations between the two countries on the border row which pushed Croatia's European Union membership talks to a standstill.
In January, EU Enlargement Commissioner Olli Rehn got engaged in efforts to settle the issue.
However, a series of the trilateral talks involving Rehn and the Slovenian and Croatian Foreign Ministers, Samuel Zbogar and Gordan Jandrokovic, produced no results and last week the European Commission said that it regretted that Croatia and Slovenia failed to make progress in talks on the settlement of their border row, underlining that it was a bilateral issue.
Carl Bildt, the Foreign Minister of Sweden which takes over the EU rotating presidency on 1 July, said on Monday that the Swedish chairmanship would not mediate in the dispute as Sweden treated it as a bilateral problem.
Asked by the Slovenian television whether he expected that an agreement with Croatia on the border demarcation must be reached before Croatia joined the EU, Pahor said on Monday that "it would be good".
Pahor said that Slovenia, which joined the European bloc in 2004 and which uses its veto to obstruct Croatia's EU accession negotiations due to the border dispute, "is not being penalised in the EU and that its reputation is not at risk".
A source from the Swedish diplomatic sources in Brussels said on Monday that by using rules about consensus in its blockade of Croatia's EU entry talks, Slovenia would lose its credibility and that credibility was the currency with which business was done in the EU.