Gibraltar Stuck Between ‘A Rock and a Hard Place’ as Spain Issues 72 Hour Ultimatum

Gibraltar Stuck Between ‘A Rock and a Hard Place’ as Spain Issues 72 Hour Ultimatum.

Stuck Between ‘A Rock and a Hard Place’.

At midnight on December 31, the United Kingdom is permanently outside the EU, Spain’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Arancha González Laya, announced this Monday that Spain is ready to “lift the Gate” to facilitate the free movement of people with Gibraltar; but, she warned, if an agreement is not reached, the Rock will be “the only place where a hard Brexit is applied.”

The Rock is expressly excluded from the agreement that Brussels and London reached on the 24th to regulate the relations that, as of January 1, the EU will maintain with its former member, so its place in Europe will depend on the outcome of the Negotiations that Spain and the United Kingdom (with the Gibraltarian Government integrated into the British delegation) have been holding since June.

González Laya insisted that Spain supports an agreement that allows maximum mobility and favours a “space of shared prosperity” on both sides of La Verja, and she assured that he will continue negotiating “until the last second of 2020” to prevent Gibraltar from becoming a “hard border” for the EU.

However, if an agreement is not reached, she added, passports will have to be stamped to enter or leave the colony (except for the 15,000 previously registered cross-border workers, for whom just an identity document will suffice). “On a smaller scale, one of the consequences may be that queues similar to those we have seen in Dover”, admitted the minister, in reference to the closure of the Channel tunnel and the French border due to the new strain of the coronavirus.

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