The Diplomat
The Association of Spanish Diplomats (ADE) yesterday expressed its “deep concern” about the “very serious lack of human and material resources” in the Consular Network, which causes “excessively long delays for the attention of citizens and a deficient quality of the service offered in many cases”.
The Consular Network is composed of 180 Consular Posts of various types (Consulates General, Consulates, Consular Sections of Embassies) and 500 Consulates and Honorary Vice-Consulates that “serve nearly three million Spaniards living abroad, as well as millions of Spaniards who travel abroad annually (for tourism, work, business or job search) and millions of foreigners who travel or reside in our country,” recalled the ADEA, the majority association of the Diplomatic Career.
In the press release, the Association assures that the Consular Network performs “an important and, in many countries, irreplaceable work of protection and assistance to Spaniards in situations of need or vulnerability” (in 2021 it attended to 249 new cases of Spanish citizens living abroad who were victims of gender violence) and offered consular support and assistance to many of the 23 million Spaniards who traveled abroad in 2019.
“In the face of complex situations,” such as the recent COVID-19 pandemic or evacuations of citizens from war zones (e.g., Afghanistan or more recently Ukraine), the members of the Directorate General of Spaniards Abroad and Consular Affairs in the central services and Consular Offices concerned “have never ceased to effectively protect and safeguard Spanish citizens,” he continued. This is in addition to the more than two million visas processed in 2019, the year before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. The Network “collected that year for the Treasury 117 million euros, of which 102 were visa fees,” it assured.
“Our Consular Offices have the vocation and obligation to assist and protect Spanish citizens abroad, but they also play a fundamental role in our economic, cultural or educational relations and the image of our country in the world largely depends on them,” warned the ADE.
However, it continued, “our Consular Network currently suffers from a very serious lack of resources”, both human (in recent years its staff has been reduced by 5%, despite the fact that the number of residents abroad registered in the consulates has tripled in the last two decades) and material (lack of resources, obsolete equipment and software, inadequate premises with architectural barriers that make access difficult for people with reduced mobility, etc.), “which causes excessively long delays for the attention of citizens and a poor quality of service offered in many cases”. “The planned investment to boost the digitization of the Consular Network is certainly welcome, although it should in no case be conceived as the solution to the insufficiency of adequately trained personnel,” warned the Association.
“Meanwhile, the local employees of our Consular Posts, who have seen their salaries frozen in recent years, and the Spanish civil servants of our Consular Network as a whole must continue to face the complaints of citizens about an often unsatisfactory service whose origin lies not in their work, but in the structural deficiencies of the Consular Network, within the framework of a process of degradation of our Foreign Service,” it continued.
For all of the above, the ADE “calls on the competent Departments in this matter (especially the Ministries of Foreign Affairs, EU and Cooperation and Finance and Public Function) to urgently adopt the necessary budgetary and administrative measures, both in terms of human resources and material means, in order to respond to the legitimate claims of the staff of our Consular Network and to adopt the essential and urgent measures to respond to the needs of the Foreign Service and its Consular Network,” concludes the press release.
