[ad_1]
Negotiators from the UK and Spain have reached a draft agreement on the future of Gibraltar after Brexit.
“Today is a day of hope,” Spanish Foreign Minister Arancha González Laya said Thursday. “In the long history of our relations with the United Kingdom, related to Gibraltar, today we are facing a turning point.”
As part of the agreement, the British Overseas Territory located at the southern tip of the Iberian Peninsula could join European Union programs and policies such as Schengen, González Laya told reporters.
With only hours before Brexit came into effect, negotiations on the future of the territory had come to an end. “The final countdown” is how Fabián Picardo, the Prime Minister of Gibraltar, had started the day On twitter.
The Brexit deal announced on Christmas Eve between the UK and the EU did not cover Gibraltar. Instead, the fate of the territory was the subject of months of parallel negotiations that focused on preserving free movement across the shared border with Spain while staying away from the centuries-old sovereignty dispute between London and Madrid.
“They were six months of intense work,” said González Laya. “There were difficult times, there were times when we were stuck.”
Picardo had long advocated for Gibraltar to join the Schengen area of abolished border controls, a move that would see Britain’s overseas territory establish closer ties with the EU just as Britain leaves the bloc.
On Thursday, González Laya said that the agreement opened the door for Gibraltar to join Schengen. “The application of these European programs and policies is being carried out with the intermediation and support of Spain, with Spain assuming responsibility.”
In recent days, Spain had increased pressure on the negotiations, with the Foreign Minister pointing to the stopped trucks that recently stretched for miles in southern England to warn of the chaos that could develop if Gibraltar is left to its own devices. of Brexit.
“If there is no agreement, Gibraltar will become the external border of the EU. That means more controls, longer waiting times and more costs, ”González Laya told reporters earlier this week.
He warned that Gibraltar, where 96% of voters in the Brexit referendum voted to stay in the EU, could end up dealing with some of the harshest consequences of Brexit, he added. “It would become the only territory that would see a hard Brexit.”
Around 15,000 people live in Spain and regularly cross to Gibraltar for work, representing approximately half of the territory’s active population. Spain said this week that, even without an agreement, all cross-border workers registered in Gibraltar by the end of the year will be exempt from border controls.
The concession, however, did little to serve the roughly 10 million tourists who visit Gibraltar each year, pouring millions of euros into the territory and nearby Spanish cities that make up the border area known as the Campo de Gibraltar.
“A hard border would have catastrophic consequences for the Campo de Gibraltar,” Juan Franco, mayor of the border city La Línea de la Concepción, told RNE radio on Wednesday. “Our economy depends entirely on Rock,” he added.
Despite cending Gibraltar to Great Britain in 1713, Spain has long sought to claim the small territory at the southern tip of the Iberian Peninsula.
[ad_2]
