The UK Ministry of Defense has played down claims that the British Government is to send additional military personnel to Gibraltar. The announcement follows reports in the Daily Express over the weekend that the British Government was to deploy additional sailors to Gibraltar to allow the Royal Navy to operate patrol boats 24 hours a day to challenge “nightmare incursions by Spanish fishing trawlers.”
The Spanish Government has accused Britain of failing to tackle a sharp rise in tobacco smuggling at the border. In a statement marking the six-month deadline set by the European Commission following its visit last year, Spain also said that cooperation with law enforcement agencies in Gibraltar had deteriorated.
On welcoming Chief Minister Fabian Picardo, UK minister for Europe David Lidington reaffirmed the strong bonds with Gibraltar and London's commitment to stand by the people of the Rock, while calling on Spain to implement EU recommendations to reduce border delays.
The Congress of Liberal International, meeting in the Netherlands, has called on the Spanish Government to end the campaign of coercion and economic sanctions against Gibraltar and urged Madrid to return to the Trilateral Forum for Dialogue.
The Spanish Government is “furious” at Gibraltar’s high profile with EU decision makers, the Rock’s Liberal Democrat MEP, Sir Graham Watson, said on Monday. The lawmaker was speaking on the eve of a three-day visit to Brussels by a delegation from the Gibraltar Government led by Chief Minister Fabian Picardo.
Spain believes negotiation with Britain is the only realistic avenue for a resolution of the claim it makes over Gibraltar and its waters and that only by a decision of the United Nations can decolonization of the Rock be settled.
The European Union is not the only place where Spain punctiliously continues to press its position on Gibraltar as a clause in every international agreement. As recently as November 2013 amendment to the Basel Convention on the control of trans-boundary movements of hazardous wastes and their disposal, Spain introduced, via the office of the UN Secretary General, a communication relating to the territorial application by UK to Gibraltar.
The Spanish Government has “not taken any step back” in relation to its Gibraltar policy “but it has taken many steps forward”, the country’s foreign minister Jose Manuel Garcia Margallo has declared. Despite the issue having dropped profile in the news since recent weeks, it is an issue “permanently” on the Spanish agenda, the Spanish official told Onda Cero radio.
A drop in the number of incursions by Spanish state vessels into British Gibraltar territorial waters could signal “a slight change in attitude” in Madrid, a British Government minister said on Monday. The observation was made during a question and answer session in the House of Lords in which there was evident cross-party support for Gibraltar in the face of pressure from Spain, reports Gibraltar's Chronicle.
The Gibraltar Government will sponsor a group of Gibraltarians and local residents who plan to travel to Brussels to protest before the European Union about delays caused by Spanish checks at the border, reports the Gibraltar Chronicle. The group approached the Government in recent months and is said to include people from all walks of life and from all shades of political opinion.