Eduardo González
The Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares, has called for next Monday, May 13, the mayors of Campo de Gibraltar, the president of the Commonwealth of Municipalities, Susana Pérez Custodio, and the counselor of the Presidency of the Junta of Andalusia, Antonio Sanz, to inform them about the negotiations between the European Union and the United Kingdom on Gibraltar.
As reported yesterday by the local newspaper Europa Sur, the meeting takes place after the Junta de Andalucía and the mayor of La Línea, Juan Franco, expressed their complaints about the lack of information about the negotiations.
Following complaints from the Board, the State Secretary for the European Union, Fernando Sampedro, telephoned Antonio Sanz to announce the call for a meeting in which the details of the negotiation would be reported. According to sources from Foreign Affairs to Southern Europe, José Manuel Albares, the mayors of the region and the president of the Commonwealth will be at the meeting.
The news comes one day before Albares appears today before the Senate plenary session to answer a question from the president of the Senate Foreign Commission and mayor of Algeciras, José Ignacio Landaluce (PP), about whether “he plans to meet with the mayors of the Campo de Gibraltar region (Cádiz) before the signing of the agreement on Gibraltar to inform them of the most important points of it.”
Sampedro assured last Tuesday that the “general political lines” of the negotiation (on the airport and the mobility of people and goods) were agreed during the first tripartite meeting held in Brussels, on April 12, by José Manuel Albares, his British colleague, David Cameron, and the executive vice-president of the European Commission for Interinstitutional Relations, Maros Sefcovic.
Sefcovic, the EU commissioner in charge of negotiations with the UK Government on the Gibraltar issue, had called the meeting in an attempt to make progress on outstanding issues in the negotiation on the future of Gibraltar after Brexit, after eighteen formal rounds of talks between Brussels and London, which began in October 2021. The Chief Minister of Gibraltar, Fabian Picardo, was present at the meeting as a member of the British delegation.
At the end of the meeting, the three parties issued a joint statement in which they limited themselves to announcing that the negotiations, in “the first meeting in this format,” were “held in a constructive atmosphere and significant progress has been achieved.” “General political lines have been agreed upon, including on the airport, goods and mobility,” the text continued. “Negotiations will continue over the coming weeks to conclude the EU-UK Agreement,” he added. According to Foreign Affairs, the objective of the negotiations, in which Spain participates as part of the EU delegation, is the disappearance of the controls in La Verja and the creation of an area of shared prosperity in the British colony and the region. of the Campo de Gibraltar.
