A distinguished academic and expert on Gibraltar, Professor Peter Gold, has argued that, having accepted that the 2006 Constitution does not affect their claim, Spain should allow the Rock to be delisted by the United Nations.

This is a reference to the UN’s decolonisation committee that lists Gibraltar amongst some 16 territories that it regards as under administration of other countries.

Gibraltar, he notes, is clearly frustrated by the fact that the UN General Assembly resolutions or decisions on Gibraltar have consistently omitted any reference to the Gibraltarians right to self-determination.

 

“That frustration is compounded by the United Nation’s regular call upon Britain and Spain to settle the issue of Gibraltar through bilateral negotiation, but without stating the UN position with regard to the Gibraltarians’ own views,” he says adding that even after the establishment in 2004 of the tripartite Forum of Dialogue, in which Gibraltar has its own voice for the first time in discussions with Britain and Spain over its future, UN decisions continue to refer to

the Brussels agreement as the main forum for negotiation. This, despite having acknowledged the establishment and progress of the tripartite Forum of Dialogue “separate from the Brussels Process.”

Professor Gold states that this harking back to Brussels means that the United Nations “supports the contentious argument that only Britain and Spain can discuss the question of Gibraltar’s sovereignty, even though no bilateral meeting has been held as part of the Brussels Process since 2002 and none is likely to be held for the foreseeable future.”

The author says that despite the claim by Britain and Gibraltar that they have not been exercised over the rejection by the United Nations since 2006 of the notion that Gibraltar is now decolonised, their frustration at what they see as the failure of the United Nations to modernise its approach to decolonisation has become increasingly apparent.

He notes that addressing the Fourth Committee in October 2008 Chief Minister Peter Caruana felt that his people had been a “victim” of the Special Committee “as it presided like a “fundamentalist watchdog” over inflexible and outdated delisting criteria.”

“If this is an apt description of the UN approach to the delisting of the remaining non-self-governing territories, it is inevitable that the Second International Decade for the Eradication of Colonialism (2001–2010), the end of which is fast approaching, will soon have to be extended into a third decade,” says Professor Gold.

But he notes that the Secretary-General had encouraged the members of the Special Committee, at its first meeting of 2009, to continue “their pragmatic and realistic approach, taking into account the specific circumstances of each territory” in order to bring their “collective efforts to a successful conclusion.”

He wanted them to “think outside the box.”

Professor Gold argues that in order to put the concepts of the Secretary General and the Special Committee chairman into practice in relation to Gibraltar, account would necessarily have to be taken of respective positions in relation to the dispute over sovereignty and then put to one side—just as the parties involved succeeded in doing in order to set up the Forum of Dialogue.

“It is true that the comments of the Spanish representative to the UN Pacific Regional Seminar on Decolonisation in May 2008 are not encouraging, when he stated that Spain would ‘oppose any initiative to see Gibraltar removed from the UN list of Non-Self-Governing Territories on the basis of its constitutional reform and its implementation’.”

But he adds that given that since its promulgation in 2006 Spain has confirmed that the new constitution does not affect the issue of sovereignty, “there is scope for the UN Special Committee and Fourth Committee to take the following steps: a) to accept that the issue of decolonisation can be detached from the question of sovereignty (which can be entrusted to the existing negotiating frameworks) without threatening current positions; b) to recogni se the ambiguities of some of the early general resolutions on decolonisation and to review earlier resolutions and decisions taken specifically on Gibraltar; and c) in the light of the criteria for decolonisation as allowed for in Resolution 2625 of 1970 and the powers granted to Gibraltar by the administering power through the Gibraltar Constitution of 2006, to review their position regarding Gibraltar’s claim to have achieved what is required for the territory and its people to be removed from the list of non-self-governing territories.”

This, concludes Professor Gold, would be in close keeping with the objectives that the UN adopted almost fifty years ago regarding non-self-governing territories. The article ‘Gibraltar and the United Nations: Caught between a treaty, the Charter and the ‘Fundamentalism’ of the Special Committee’ appears in the latest edition of Diplomacy and Statecraft. The author is Emeritus Professor of Hispanic Studies the University of West England.