Luis Ayllón
The Parliamentary Popular Group yesterday requested the Permanent Delegation of the Congress of Deputies to convene an extraordinary session of the Plenary of the Congress of Deputies in order for the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, to explain the principle of agreement reached by the Executive with the United Kingdom on Gibraltar.
In the request for a meeting of the Permanent Deputation, since Congress is not in session in January, the people demand the “urgent appearance” of Sánchez “to explain the situation in Gibraltar, following the United Kingdom’s departure from the European Union”.
Although the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Arancha González Laya, said last day that a principle of agreement had been reached on Gibraltar, which would explain the details of the agreement, in a congressional hearing, the Partido Popular is asking the President of the Government to provide these explanations.
“The Government’s agreement with the United Kingdom on Gibraltar requires transparency. That is why we have registered a request for Pedro Sánchez to appear before Congress to give an account of all aspects of the agreement and the situation following the United Kingdom’s departure from the EU”, the spokesperson for the Popular Group, Cuca Gamarra, said on her Twitter account.
For her part, the Partido Popular spokesperson for the Foreign Affairs Committee in the Lower House, Valentina Martínez Ferro, wrote on the same social network: “We demand transparency from the Government and that it should now make known the agreement it has reached with the United Kingdom on Gibraltar”.
“There is no reason why a codicil to the Brexit agreement with the EU should not be made known at the same time as this one”, she added.
Although the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has contacted the spokespersons of the parliamentary groups, they have not been informed of the details of the principle of the agreement, especially on the way in which passport control will be exercised at the airport and port of Gibraltar in order to gain access to the colony, once Spain has accepted that it will form part of the Schengen area.
Yesterday, the opposition parties watched in amazement as, while González Laya assured the newspaper El País that Spain would have the last word on who enters Gibraltar, the Rock’s chief minister, Fabian Picardo, assured the opposite.
In his Twitter account, Picardo wrote: “According to the New Year’s Eve Agreement only Gibraltar decides who enters Gibraltar and no Spanish agent will carry out checks of any kind at the airport or in the port of Gibraltar, neither now nor in the next four years. This is our land”.
Reliable sources told The Diplomat that the Spanish agents will not be physically present at the Gibraltar airport terminal, but in an adjacent building, from where they will be connected to Frontex agents, who will carry out the controls and pass on the information about the passengers.
