Dozens of Argentine military officers who were complicit in crimes against humanity in the country during the 1976-1983 military dictatorship had been sent to Spain for training, new documents revealed this week.
Spain’s Minister for Foreign Affairs, Jose Manuel Garcia-Margallo, said he was “absolutely convinced” that the British Government backed Spain’s bid to join the UN Security Council as a non-permanent member.
In three rounds of voting on Thursday the United Nations General Assembly elected Angola, Malaysia, New Zealand, Spain and Venezuela to serve as non-permanent members on the Security Council for two-year terms beginning on 1 January 2015.
Spain’s separate battles to both become a temporary member of the United Nations Security Council and to also force Britain into bilateral negotiations over Gibraltar appear to be on a collision course, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal.
The Foreign Office reacted strongly to the 5 October 2014 serious incursion into British Gibraltar Territorial Waters (BGTW) by a Spanish state research vessel. In response to the incident, the Minister for Europe, the Rt Hon David Lidington MP, earlier called Spanish Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs Gonzalo de Benito to express his grave concern.
Spanish fighter jets illegally entered UK airspace to fly “across the bows” of a British airliner in a “reckless and dangerous” stunt over Gibraltar, according to a report in the Sunday Express.
Spain's Constitutional Court has suspended an independence referendum called by Catalonia for November, although political forces in the wealthy north-east region forged ahead with a political campaign ahead of their planned vote.
Catalonia's president on Saturday formally called a referendum to decide whether Spain's richest region should be independent, defying Madrid which vowed to block the move. Shortly after Artur Mas set the vote for November 9, the Spanish government said the referendum would not take place because it was unconstitutional.
Gibraltar Governor Sir James Dutton has publicly voiced strong support for the deployment of a larger British naval vessel to patrol Gibraltar’s territorial waters.
Sir James, a retired Royal Marine with a distinguished military record, said such a move would send “a really valuable message” in the face of persistent incursions by Spanish state vessels.
In Europe's eastern half, the disintegration of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia created many new countries. In Western Europe, however, borders of the old nation states seemed to be carved in stone and although there have been secessionist tendencies, some of them militant, they never seemed to have a shot in reality, according to a Deutsche Welle report from Berlin.