As Britain heads for a weekend summit designed to seal its impending departure from the EU, Spain is threatening to throw a last-minute spanner in the works over the tiny peninsula of Gibraltar.
Madrid, which has long laid claim to the overseas British territory attached to the Spanish mainland, is threatening to derail the whole Brexit process over the status of “the Rock,” which has a population of barely 30,000.
Spain fears that the withdrawal deal does not explicitly hand it a post-Brexit veto on future relations between the EU and Gibraltar, which in a 2002 referendum voted overwhelmingly against shared sovereignty between London and Madrid.
After Britain and the EU agreed to a draft Brexit declaration on Thursday, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez repeated a threat to scupper the deal.
“After my conversation with [British Prime Minister] Theresa May, our positions remain far away. My government will always defend the interests of Spain,” he wrote on Twitter. “If there are no changes, we will veto Brexit.”
Gibraltar Chief Minister Fabian Picardo had earlier accused Spain of seeking to force an issue that has regularly driven a wedge between London and Madrid.
Picardo told parliament that Spain, the eurozone’s fourth largest economy, “does not need a whip to get the smallest economy in Europe to sit around the table with it and have a meaningful discussion about cooperation.”
The geography of Gibraltar — a 6.8km2 rocky outcrop on Spain’s southern tip — means that there are no shortage of reasons to cooperate with Spain, he said.
After Britain leaves the EU, Spain wants to negotiate directly with London on all issues related to Gibraltar, which was ceded to the British crown in a peace treaty in 1713.
This had been provided for, initially, in a clause to the draft withdrawal agreement that effectively gave Madrid a veto on any Gibraltar-related agreement between the block and the UK.
However, the clause has disappeared from the final draft, and while Spain threatens to derail the entire Brexit deal over this omission, Gibraltarians say they are being used as pawns in a struggle for power.
For Hamish Thomson, a 44-year-old anesthetist, “it verges on insanity that a country [Spain] of 500,000km2 with a population of 46 million and profound internal issues spends so much of its energy on a three-mile square outcrop of limestone with 30,000 people on it.”
Elton Moreno, also 44 and a manager at a Gibraltar-based gaming company, said: “I’m not surprised. I’m surprised anyone is surprised that we’re being used in this tug of war. I’m just feeling tired that we always seem to be in the news, and I’m angry that our currency keeps on fluctuating because of incompetence in the UK government.”
Gibraltarians voted by 96 percent to stay in the EU in the 2016 Brexit referendum.
Sanchez on Wednesday said that “we are defending the interests of the Spanish nation and shall do so to the end.”
In 1969, Spanish dictator general Francisco Franco ordered the border between Spain and Gibraltar closed after Gibraltarians voted overwhelmingly in 1967 to retain links to Britain.
The border only reopened 13 years later, seven years after his death.
As tensions rise once more, barrister Moses Anahory, 48, said it was “wholly unacceptable for the Spanish Government to threaten to exercise its veto over the Brexit Withdrawal Agreement at the eleventh hour.”
“Unfortunately, while unacceptable, it’s hardly surprising for Spain to raise the ‘Gibraltar issue’ at the last minute,” said Anahory. “It certainly does nothing to create an atmosphere locally that Spain can be trusted to respect agreements it has signed up to,” including a 2006 tripartite cooperation accord.
Owen Smith, 41, a barrister, said: “Like the vast majority of Gibraltarians I voted to remain and I’d be happy to see the Brexit process derailed if remaining in the EU was the outcome, but I don’t see the current row about Gibraltar as one capable of derailing the Brexit process. Spain is applying pressure to achieve last minute concessions in respect of Gibraltar. I hope they don’t succeed — but I’m worried they might.”
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
‘DISAPPEARED COMPLETELY’: The melting of thousands of glaciers is a major threat to people in the landlocked region that already suffers from a water shortage Near a wooden hut high up in the Kyrgyz mountains, scientist Gulbara Omorova walked to a pile of gray rocks, reminiscing how the same spot was a glacier just a few years ago. At an altitude of 4,000m, the 35-year-old researcher is surrounded by the giant peaks of the towering Tian Shan range that also stretches into China, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. The area is home to thousands of glaciers that are melting at an alarming rate in Central Asia, already hard-hit by climate change. A glaciologist, Omarova is recording that process — worried about the future. She hiked six hours to get to
The number of people in Japan aged 100 or older has hit a record high of more than 95,000, almost 90 percent of whom are women, government data showed yesterday. The figures further highlight the slow-burning demographic crisis gripping the world’s fourth-biggest economy as its population ages and shrinks. As of Sept. 1, Japan had 95,119 centenarians, up 2,980 year-on-year, with 83,958 of them women and 11,161 men, the Japanese Ministry of Health said in a statement. On Sunday, separate government data showed that the number of over-65s has hit a record high of 36.25 million, accounting for 29.3 percent of