Submission from Mr E H Peire, Secretary,
Rock Firm (War Veterans) Group, Gibraltar
GIBRALTAR—CORDOBA AGREEMENT
Thank you for your letter of 7 September in
reply to our request for assistance in obtaining a reply from
the Foreign Minister. We have this month received a reply from
The Group Leader of the Western Mediterranean Group. The essence
of this matter is that the Foreign Office with the connivance
of Gibraltar's Chief Minister has provided Spain with joint-use
of a British military airport by the wily use of the irrelevant
Schengen Accord of which Gibraltar is not a part. A subtle use
of a convention that does not apply to Gibraltar and they cannot
satisfactorily explain away; the twin brother of an Airport Agreement
that the people of Gibraltar had previously rejected. The solution
could have been to apply VAT to the Rock and include it in the
Schengen area. The result now is that for the rest of Europe "Gibraltar
begins to be Spanish" as the headlines of the Spanish weekly
Magazine "El Tiempo" claimed on the 14th of last
month.
Our specific concerns on sovereignty were described
to the F&CO as "... the terms that, enable Spain to use
the MOD airstrip as if it were a Spanish Airport, to appoint a
Spaniard to a liaison committee and to share administrative functions
at the terminal". They fail to satisfy us on the first concern
and completely ignored the other two. We still feel that the guarantee
on sovereignty in our Constitution has been breached.
Mr Caruana's re-election has nothing to do with
his policy on Spain but rather that Gibraltarians have not forgiven
the GSLP debacle due to the fast launches tobacco runs. He obtained
3% less votes (48%) but managed to beat the opposition by a few
hundred because of the thousands of UK Nationals now working and/or
residing in Gibraltar, who increased the electoral list by about
four thousand through Mr Caruana's change in the law reducing
the qualifying residential period to a mere six months. These
same people had been denied a vote in the Referendum on the New
Constitution because there was so much power being claimed from
the UK on the judiciary and the police.
29 January 2008
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