Sir Joe tells UN seminar Spain ‘deliberately misrepresents’ Gib issues

Sir Joe Bossano told a UN seminar on Thursday that Spain was “deliberately misrepresenting” issues relating to Gibraltar when facts said otherwise, as he underlined a longstanding policy that for decades has remained unchanged: “We are the Gibraltarians, and the Rock is ours.”

Sir Joe was addressing the UN’s decolonisation committee, better know as the C24, during its annual regional seminar in Dili, in Timor-Leste.

Sir Joe said Gibraltar’s decolonisation was “exclusively a matter” between the Gibraltarians and the UK as administering power.

Spain’s position is that the true inhabitants of Gibraltar were forced to leave in 1704, but Sir Joe reminded delegates that the Spanish population was in Gibraltar for around 200 years and had expelled the previous Muslim population which had inhabited the Rock for 750 years.

Gibraltarians had been on the Rock for 320 years.

“Since 1704 countless European wars have resulted in territorial boundary changes and populations replaced,” he said.

“In all the American colonies, Spain, UK and France replaced indigenous people with their own imported citizens and slaves from Africa.”

“Are they not all the Peoples of the territories that have been decolonised?”
Sir Joe said Spain had made clear at the UN that it would never acknowledge any international legal status to the “current inhabitants” of Gibraltar.

But he reminded delegates that the UK, on Gibraltar’s behalf, had signed a tax treaty with Spain that identified the Gibraltarian “as an international legal identity different from persons of other nationalities residing in Spain and provides a more favourable tax treatment”.

“The UN decolonisation program has always been about the rights of the People, and not uninhabited territories,” Sir Joe said, adding the UN had as far back as 1946 recognised the status of the Gibraltarians as a non-self-governing People.

Against the backdrop of the Chagos deal, he said the territory registered at the time included the whole of Gibraltar’s seven kilometres, including its isthmus which Spain claims separately.

The Chagos decision, underpinned by an international legal ruling that said the islands should have been decolonised with Mauritius, “shows the territorial integrity that we’re talking about is Gibraltar’s territorial integrity, not Spain’s”.

He recalled too Spain’s “siege” of Gibraltar under General Franco, hostility that was put down to the fact it was a dictatorship.

But after Spain became a democracy following Franco’s death, his actions were criticised but concessions were demanded to lift the blockade and reopen the frontier.

“The point of bringing this to your attention is so that C24 understands the issues as they happened and not as they are misinterpreted by Spain,” he said.

“Democratic Spain defends at the UN the 1960s policy of fascist Spain and uses the same arguments.”

“They say Gibraltar has no territorial waters, no aviation rights and no right to its isthmus which joins our two countries.”

“Well, in 1973, our territorial waters, airspace and isthmus became EU territory and Spain was not in the EU.”

“When we left Brexit, we took with us our territorial waters, our air space and isthmus, which ceased to be EU.”

“We now have a border with the EU, which happens to be the dividing line demarcating the end of Spain and the beginning of Gibraltar.”

“This is the International Law that Spain refuses to accept because it seems that their mind-set is still in the world of 1704.”

And he added that one position Spain had maintained for over six decades “defies all logic”.

“Every time Spain has made a proposal on transfer of sovereignty it has promised that it would retain the then existing level of self-government in the resultant decolonisation,” Sir Joe said.

“So Madam Chair, perhaps your committee can explain how it is that we are a listed colony if the sovereignty is held by UK and we are decolonised and delisted under an identical constitutional relationship, if under the sovereignty of Spain.”

“Our answer to Spain’s claims has been the same from day one.”

“Not one inch, not one grain of sand of our beaches, none of our airspace or our territorial waters are we prepared to give away, dilute or barter.”

“We will fight to the death in the defence of our country and preserve it for future generations of Gibraltarians.”

“This is our policy today. That was our policy when we started. That will be the policy for the future.”

“Until we achieve our goal of decolonisation and international recognition, of our right, to our land.”

“We are the Gibraltarians, and the Rock is ours.”