‘Today it’s calm, but it’s relentless’, Llamas says of treaty rollout 

Attorney General Michael Llamas has described the early weeks of Gibraltar’s new UK/EU treaty arrangements as a period of intense but expected adjustment, adding that the underlying framework is working despite the “frenzy” that accompanied its provisional implementation. 

Mr Llamas, Gibraltar’s chief negotiator during nearly five years of talks, said the initial difficulties were largely down to the scale of the change, particularly in relation to the movement of goods. 

He said the situation had settled considerably since the first days of implementation, although officials continued to deal with a steady stream of practical questions across different areas. 

Customs issues generate the largest share of work, reflecting the complexity of applying a broad legal framework to thousands of different commodities and circumstances, ranging from the transportation of blood samples to commercial laundry. 

“Today it's calm, but it's relentless,” Mr Llamas said. 

“Every day, we’re dealing with 10 different issues.” 

“But the framework is there and it works.” 

One area where Mr Llamas was particularly positive was cooperation between Gibraltar Customs and its Spanish counterparts in La Linea, where officials are in regular contact to resolve practical issues as and when they arise. 

“The cooperation between both customs offices is really excellent,” he said. 

“It's daily contact.” 

Resources have also been targeted to assist businesses to adapt to the new framework, while draft Gibraltar Customs guidance was shared with Spain’s Agencia Tributaria to ensure both sides were interpreting the arrangements in the same way. 

Mr Llamas acknowledged that this operational cross-border cooperation flowed in large measure from political support in Madrid for the treaty, raising the question of what could happen should a future Spanish government take a different approach. 

But he stressed the agreement was between the UK and EU, meaning Spain’s role in implementing it formed part of wider EU obligations. 

“Your guess is as good as mine,” he said of the potential impact of a change of government in Spain, where a general election is due next year. 

“These are treaty obligations.” 

“So if Spain starts not delivering, what they have to bear in mind is that they're putting the EU in breach of their treaty obligations.” 

“It's not just a matter for them.” 

Mr Llamas said the treaty contained mechanisms to escalate any systemic failure to comply with obligations, placing any dispute beyond the bilateral Gibraltar-Spain relationship. 

And he rejected concerns that the treaty’s termination clause, which allows either side to end the agreement with 12 months’ notice, would undermine confidence or deter investment in Gibraltar. 

He said the provision was standard in EU agreements and should not be viewed as evidence that the Gibraltar treaty was inherently unstable. 

“It is the standard termination clause in all EU agreements,” Mr Llamas said. 

As an example, he pointed to the EU’s trade agreement with Japan, which underpins substantial trade and investment despite containing a similar provision. 

His argument was that businesses routinely make long-term decisions on the basis of international agreements containing termination clauses and the Gibraltar treaty should be viewed in the same context. 

‘STAR CHAMBERS’ 

Attention over the coming weeks and months will also turn to formal ratification of the treaty by the UK and European parliaments. 

Mr Llamas said he did not anticipate difficulties in Westminster under the UK’s parliamentary treaty scrutiny process, which he expected to conclude around late September or early October. 

EU ratification will take longer but is expected to conclude mid-December. 

Mr Llamas said the Schengen provisions were likely to attract the closest scrutiny from MEPs, given that entry into Gibraltar under the new arrangements provides onward access across the Schengen area. 

The European Parliament’s decision will ultimately be one of consent or rejection rather than an opportunity to amend the treaty text, with the main political groups already indicating their support during a first debate earlier this month. 

For Mr Llamas, the provisional implementation phase comes after a negotiation that began nearly five years ago and involved 17 major negotiating rounds followed by around two years of more focused technical discussions. 

That intensity was evident in his office, where boxes of documents relating to the negotiations were stacked against one wall and files on live implementation issues covered a nearby table. 

Mr Llamas described a process that had created close working relationships with officials in London, Brussels and Madrid, something he believes Gibraltar must preserve and develop. 

On the UK side, he said the negotiations had left officials across Whitehall with a depth of knowledge about Gibraltar rarely seen before. 

“We were really working in a very close team, an excellent working relationship,” he said. 

Before formal UK/EU talks began in 2021, Gibraltar’s proposals were stress-tested by officials across Whitehall in sessions Mr Llamas described as “Star Chambers”. 

UK experts challenged the plans closely, particularly the novel model for goods, forcing Gibraltar to refine and defend its position before negotiations with the EU. 

It also amounted to valuable preparation for the tougher negotiations with the EU that followed. 

Maintaining the institutional knowledge built up in London would be important as officials moved to other roles, Mr Llamas said, as would preserving relationships with Spanish and EU officials developed during the talks. 

FROM NEGOTIATION TO MANAGEMENT 

The focus now is shifting from negotiating the treaty to managing it. 

Mr Llamas said discussions had already begun on the teams that will sit on the bodies created under the agreement. 

These include a Cooperation Council at political level and three specialised committees dealing respectively with Schengen, goods and trade, and the airport. 

Those structures will provide the forum for addressing practical difficulties and resolving disagreements before they develop into formal disputes. 

The final agreement was shaped by difficult negotiations in which Gibraltar, the UK and EU at times held positions that appeared difficult to reconcile. 

Mr Llamas recalled that one of the EU’s initial positions on immigration controls would have meant passengers arriving from the UK facing only a Schengen immigration check. 

Gibraltar and the UK rejected it outright. 

“As you can imagine, our reaction to that was ‘it’s out of the question, completely out of the question’,” he said. 

“This was a red line for us and for the UK government as well.” 

Months of negotiation eventually produced the cumulative system of controls contained in the treaty, first a Gibraltar immigration control, then the Schengen check. 

But the initial impasse he described illustrates the complexity of the talks, which largely unfolded out of the public eye. 

There were “many moments”, Mr Llamas acknowledged, when agreement appeared unlikely. 

“Many moments when we didn't meet for months because we had fallen out,” he said. 

The arrangements for goods proved another major challenge. 

Mr Llamas said Gibraltar had concluded it lacked both the resources and scale to independently operate the full range of EU customs requirements, particularly specialist sanitary controls. 

The solution was a purpose-built model in which compliance with EU customs law is discharged through designated control points in Spain rather than by Gibraltar itself. 

Brexit had removed significant rights, including EU citizenship and free movement including the right to reside, but the paradox was that the treaty now gave Gibraltar its closest-ever relationship with the EU in two fields from which it was excluded even while the UK was a member, namely Schengen and the customs union. 

The new relationship was “more bespoke, tailor-made”,” he said. 

Even so, “it can't replace membership because we've lost vital things, just being a European citizen”. 

“For a lot of us, certainly for me, being a European citizen and being able to vote in elections to the European Parliament, it’s a tragedy that we have lost that and the EU concept of free movement [which allows the right to reside in other EU countries].” 

“Obviously, that is lost, but it is also true that we now have the closest relationship [with the EU], almost de facto part of it, not de jure, but de facto part of it.” 

For Mr Llamas, however, the immediate priority was less about theoretical questions and more about making the machinery of the agreement work in practice. 

The first weeks exposed the scale of that task, particularly for frontline agencies and businesses adapting to a system unlike anything Gibraltar had previously operated, even while within the EU. 

His assessment remained that the agreement should be given time before firm conclusions are drawn, with an initial review after three months and a clearer picture emerging after six. 

Until then, the work will continue issue by issue, through the officials and institutions now responsible for turning nearly five years of negotiation into Gibraltar’s new daily reality.