Josep Borrell in his appearance of the Congress of Deputies.
The Diplomat. 04/07/2018
The Minister of Foreign Affairs, Josep Borrell, explained in the Congress of Deputies that he has instructed the ambassadors and consuls accredited abroad to respond to the interventions of the Catalan independence leaders in the same way that Pedro Morenés did in Washington last week.
«An ambassador can’t attend impassively to the attacks to the institutions of his country, to the disqualifications that were said like that in Spain there are political prisoners and that do not correspond to the reality», said referring to the «deeply disqualifying» of the president Catalan, Quim Torra, in the American capital.
«Diplomacy is to defend the good name of Spain in the world», he added in his first speech to the deputies of the Foreign Affairs Committee. Therefore, Borrell has sent the text of the intervention of Morenés to the ambassadors so that they stick to him in case they have to respond to secessionist politicians in forums or foreign institutions. «(Morenés) did what he had to do and said what he had to say. He responded in a courteous and polite manner, with verifiable information, and pointed out that the things that had been said were not true», the minister said.
The head of the Spanish Diplomacy said that the representatives of the Government defend the country against the attacks of the independence movement, and those who criticize the Spanish democratic standards asked them to collate the data of independent organizations since they give Spain a democratic quality «well above from countries that want to give us lessons, like Belgium”.
Likewise, Borrell defended the Spanish consul in Sttutgart (Germany), Carlos Medina, after the criticism of the Catalan vice-president, Pere Aragonés, and his political formation -ERC- for trying yesterday to intervene in a forum of regions in which Catalonia was and which counted with the assistance of ‘number two’ of Torra. «The consul has not boycotted anything or anyone. He was invited, he asked to intervene, they did not leave him and that was it», said Borrell.
