Word: gibraltars
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...Caruana hardly furthered the meeting's cause himself, however, when one week before its scheduled start, he issued a public statement reminding local boat owners that despite the European Commission's environmental ruling, Spain has no police jurisdiction in Gibraltar's waters and so "all requests by Spanish authorities within British Gibraltar Territorial Waters to board vessels ... should be refused." The call to what some Spaniards saw as open rebellion threw the talks into disarray; the Spanish press reported on Thursday, July 16, that diplomatic sources saw little likelihood of the meeting's going ahead...
...late Friday, it was back on again. A source within the Spanish Foreign Ministry declined to say how exactly the issue was resolved, but Dominique Searle, editor of the Gibraltar daily the Chronicle, believes Spain took a pragmatic approach. "It's my impression that they refused to change the demarcation [of waters] but agreed that they wouldn't act upon...
...needed from the Tripartite Forum talks, whose program includes discussions of visas, financial regulations, education and, yes, the environment. "There's an absolute void there, so when you have a catastrophe like the New Flame [a cargo ship that collided with an oil tanker and sank off the Gibraltar coast in 2007], any initiative by anyone only produces more conflict," he says. "In that sense, any agreement that comes out of the talks will be better than what there is now, which is nothing." (See pictures of Spain's Madcap Tomato Festival...
...Pragmatism may also well influence the reception Moratinos receives when he becomes the first Spanish Foreign Minister to visit Gibraltar since Don Diego de Salinas and his downtrodden troops surrendered to British forces in 1704. Although one political party on the Rock has urged locals to fly the British and Gibraltar flags as a display of their "inalienable right to self-determination," Searle doesn't expect much in the way of open hostility. "In the end, the meeting came on short notice," he says. "And we're very deep into summer...
...Read "Gibraltar Opening...