United Nations - The Chief Minister of Gibraltar, Mr Peter Caruana, called on the UN Decolonisation Committee yesterday to stop recommending each year that Britain and Spain negotiate on the future of the tiny British colony that Madrid claims.
"The people of Gibraltar will not accept. . . that the decolonisation of Gibraltar is a matter to be negotiated between the UK and Spain," he said. "It therefore does not further the cause of our decolonisation that this committee recommends a continuation of that sterile dialogue year after year," Mr Caruana said.
Gibraltar, long an object of contention between Spain and Britain, was captured by an Anglo-Dutch force in 1704 and passed to Britain under the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht.
The notion that a territory could be decolonised under the auspices of the committee by its transfer from the colonial power to a third party claimant, regardless of the wishes and rights of the inhabitants of the territory, was "bizarre and an affront to the mandate, work and very raison d'etre of this committee," Mr Caruana said. Gibraltar was "almost entirely self-governing in practice" and sought an even fuller measure of self-government by modernising its constitutional relationship with Britain, "so that it should cease to be colonial in nature," he said.