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Spain and Great Britain reached an agreement in principle at the last minute that Gibraltar would normally join the Schengen area without border controls. This will prevent the border between Spain and Gibraltar at the southern tip of the Iberian Peninsula from becoming an impervious external border for the EU as of January 1, 2021, said Spain’s Foreign Minister Arancha González Laya, the Thursday in Madrid. Instead, Gibraltar will now join more closely with Spain and the European Union as a surprising consequence of Britain’s departure from the EU. In the 2016 Brexit referendum, 96 percent of Gibraltar’s 33,000 residents voted to remain in the EU.
Until recently, Spain and Great Britain had negotiated a Brexit regulation for Gibraltar under increasing time pressure. The British overseas territory is not part of the Christmas Eve agreement between the EU and Great Britain, but rather the talks were bilateral between Madrid on the one hand and Great Britain and Gibraltar on the other. The agreement in principle that has now been reached between Madrid and London must then be agreed between the EU and London, said González Laya.
The external border of the EU will be transferred to the international airport of the overseas territory when Gibraltar is accepted into the Schengen area. The EU border protection agency, Frontex, is supposed to monitor travelers there. According to González Laya, the carelessness is in Spain. This is a sore point for the people of Gibraltar, because Spain is contesting Britain’s sovereignty over Monkey Rock. However, Madrid had insisted on supervising the controls, because Spain was obliged to control the external border with the other Schengen states. Great Britain cannot because it does not belong to the Schengen area and neither can Gibraltar because it is not a state.
The chancellor warned that otherwise Spain’s border with Gibraltar would have become the EU’s external border earlier in the year. On a smaller scale, scenes similar to the truck jam in front of Dover in Britain threatened, the minister warned. González Laya assured that during a transitional period Spain will maintain the previous regulations on the border with Gibraltar.
Every day 15,000 people from Spain cross the border into Gibraltar in the morning to go to work and return at night. Until now, they only have to show their identity card and are told to come in. A special regulation allows everyone who has registered to continue doing so. However, in times without Corona, around seven million tourists are added each year. If everyone had to present a passport at the new EU external border, which would have to be sealed, the single transition would be hopelessly overburdened and employees would hardly pass.
