MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Foreign Office embarrassed: Sorry, did you mean Algeciras or Algeria?

Across the bay or across the Mediterranean

In 2006, British officials filed an application to list part of Gibraltar waters as an EU protected nature site. Now it has emerged they got the wrong coordinates: Instead of designating the sea around Gibraltar, they listed a stretch of water somewhere off the coast of Algeria.

The embarrassing mistake was revealed by Graham Watson, Gibraltar’s Liberal Democrat MEP, who was scathing in his criticism. “Which bureaucrat in the cuckoo’s nest of government policy-making is responsible?” he asked.

“If the Spanish Armada had made such a basic error, they’d have foundered before Drake even had the opportunity to sink them.”

“Were it not for the EU having abolished the death penalty, this government official might be hung, drawn and quartered for such a crass mistake.”

A spokesman at the Foreign Office played down the mix-up and said it had not invalidated the designation of the British site. “The maps submitted at the time identified the site boundaries as being in Gibraltar waters,” the spokesman said. In any event, “the error was corrected earlier this year when the UK updated its revised list”.

The details of the bureaucratic bungle were unveiled at an awkward time for Gibraltar in its row with Brussels. The Gibraltar Government, with Britain’s support, is taking legal action against the European Commission over its decision to approve a Spanish site within British Gibraltar waters.

The Spanish site overlaps with the British site – the one around Gibraltar that is, not opposite Algiers – and its approval by the EC prompted a furious reaction here and in London.

Both Gibraltar and the UK see this as a direct affront to British sovereignty over those waters. Britain is also considering launching a separate legal case against the Commission over its decision to leave the contentious Spanish designation on the latest updated list of EU nature sites. (Gibraltar Chronicle).-