Spain-UK relations

‘Gibraltar is the only colony in 21st Century Europe’

Published on 26 September 2013 at 09:30

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Spanish PM Mariano Rajoy invited the UK to re-negotiate the status of Gibraltar and denounced the “anachronistic” situation of the Rock at the United Nation’s General Assembly on September 25, reports ABC.

Rajoy described Gibraltar as "the only colonial territory that remains in Europe in the 21st Century", one of the principal arguments Spanish diplomats have used in recent years. In 1963, Gibraltar was included in the UN list of Non-Self-Governing Territories.

One the same day as Rajoy’s speech, an EU mission was dispatched to Gibraltar to probe UK and Spanish claims made this summer regarding the sinking of concrete blocks off the peninsula’s coast, alleged money laundering and smuggling in the territory and punative checks on people crossing the border.

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