The Diplomat
The Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares, celebrated yesterday in the Senate that the European Commission and the British Government have “finally” reached an agreement to “fit the Northern Ireland Protocol” in the future relationship between the two parties.
Last May, the then British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, threatened to unilaterally break the Protocol for Northern Ireland because of the complexity and high cost of its implementation. That decision by London was a major setback in the negotiations between the EU and the UK on the implementation of the Withdrawal Agreement, which not only jeopardized the continuity of the trade agreements between the two parties, but even threatened to paralyze the negotiations on the Treaty on Gibraltar.
Finally, and after several days of negotiations in Windsor, the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, and the British Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, reached an agreement yesterday to relax the provisions of the Protocol for Northern Ireland.
The agreement, which will still have to overcome the reluctance of the hard-line Conservative wing in the House of Commons, will allow the EU to remove many of the controls on goods coming into Northern Ireland from the UK. The British province of Northern Ireland has no physical border with the Republic of Ireland, an EU member state, and a hard border would have violated the Good Friday Peace Agreement, which ended decades of violence. As a result, Northern Ireland remains within the European Common Area and customs have been moved to the Irish Sea, which separates the island of Great Britain from the island of Ireland.
José Manuel Albares expressed yesterday, during his appearance before the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee to report on the priorities and challenges of Spanish foreign policy for 2023, his “joy” for the agreement, which has allowed Brussels and London to have managed, “finally”, to find a “fit for the Northern Ireland Protocol”.
The Government of Gibraltar “welcomes the strengthening of relations between the United Kingdom and the European Union which this deal represents”. “The issues relating to Northern Ireland and Gibraltar are, of course, different. We nonetheless continue to work optimistically towards a mutually beneficial outcome for all parties which respects the positions of all parties and delivers for people in the region”, it said.
Last May, Albares expressed Spain’s “solidarity” with Ireland for the stalled negotiations between the UK and the EU on the Northern Ireland Protocol. However, he warned that these negotiations are “separate” from those on Gibraltar and “have no more in common” than the involvement of the British government.
Spain and the European Commission have presented a “global proposal” for the creation of a zone of shared prosperity between Gibraltar and the Campo de Gibraltar, which has already been sent to the United Kingdom and which includes, as the most controversial point, the Spanish control of the external borders of the colony “in the name of Schengen”. In mid-December, José Manuel Albares and his British counterpart, James Cleverly, assured in Madrid that there were already “clear advances” in the negotiations on Gibraltar’s future relationship with the EU, but did not want to advance any date for the agreement.
