The Diplomat
The Catalan government’s Conselleria d’Acció Exterior plans to open six new delegations of the Government abroad this year, which will be added to the 14 already existing ones and which will strengthen the presence of the Generalitat in Africa, America and also Asia, the continent in which it will open its first delegations.
The new delegations will be in Japan, South Korea, West Africa, Southern Africa, Brazil and Andorra, announced the councillor for External Action, Victòria Alsina, at the ‘Més Catalunya al món’ event with officials from the department, delegates, consuls and social agents at the Palau de Pedralbes in Barcelona, reports Europa Press.
Alsina defended that “we must have one foot in Asia”, which is why the Government has opted to open delegations in Japan and South Korea, which will have their headquarters in Tokyo and Seoul, respectively, while the headquarters of the Brazil delegation will be in Brasilia, and the Andorra delegation will be in Andorra la Vella.
The West Africa delegation will be based in Dakar (Senegal) and will also cover Gambia, Ivory Coast, Nigeria, Ghana and Mali, while the Southern Africa delegation will be based in Pretoria (South Africa) and will also cover Angola and Mozambique.
In addition, the Conselleria will create three offices that will be attached to existing delegations and will be located in Quebec (Canada), Dublin (Ireland) and Ljubljana (Slovenia), and it will have two new special envoys in places that it considers require special attention: Poland and Scotland.
These offices depend on delegations and are opened when it is considered that an area cannot be covered without a physical presence and team -until now there have been offices in New York (United States) and Alghero (Italy)-, while the special envoys are temporary single-person positions for situations of particular interest.
The Conselleria has also promoted a reorganisation and broadening of the scope of some of the existing delegations, such as Mexico, which will become the delegation of Mexico and Central America, and Argentina, which also covers Chile, Uruguay and Paraguay and will be renamed the delegation of the Southern Cone.
The Govern delegation in the Balkans will become the delegation in Southeast Europe, while the delegation in the United States will change its name to include Canada, and the delegation in Tunisia, which also covers Morocco, will move to Rabat (Morocco) and become the delegation in North Africa.
“We are going from having 44 to 63 countries in which Catalonia will have an institutional presence as a government”, said Alsina, who stressed that this is a qualitative and quantitative leap that will take shape over the coming months.
he councillor welcomed the “rectification of the Court of Auditors”, which has accepted the guarantees of the Catalan Institute of Finance (ICF) for former officials of the Government for external action between 2011 and 2017, which Alsina believes have this process open for having done their work and a task set out in the Statute.
She defended Catalonia having a voice in the world without tutelage or intermediaries, and warned those who reject Catalan foreign action that Catalonia will travel as never before: “For a nation like Catalonia, doing foreign action is like breathing”, she said.
Finally, she affirmed that the Catalans have been dreaming of international recognition for centuries: “Let us wake up, because the best way to prepare ourselves to be a state is to start acting as much as we can as if we were one,” she said.
