Walter Finch
SPAIN is dispatching a warship to the Strait of Gibraltar on a mission to ‘observe and deter’ during a time of heightened tensions with the British Overseas Territory.
The Spanish Defence Staff has announced that el Rayo, a 2860-tonne, 94m maritime patrol vessel, will conduct operations in the Strait and the Alboran Sea ‘to help ensure the security of national maritime areas.’
The Rayo is one of two Metereo-class vessels in the Spanish navy, also known as a BAM (Buque de Accion Marítima or Maritime Action Ship) which are designed to ‘control areas of Spanish sovereignty and national interest.’
The deployment comes at a particularly sensitive moment as Spanish officials accuse Gibraltar of ‘invading their sovereign waters’ with a large land reclamation project on the Mediterranean side of the Rock.
The Eastside project is an ambitious €340-million commercial development which will include a super yacht marina, office blocks, a shopping centre, and residential apartments.
Although it has been claimed that much of the land reclamation will come from rubble leftover from the constructions of the Kingsway tunnel, it is believed that earth is also being trucked in from quarries across the border in Casares and Manilva.
The Spanish Foreign Ministry said last week that it had protested multiple times about the landfill, which it claims Gibraltar is carrying out in Spanish territorial waters.
The ministry claims the land reclamation is a violation of international law, as well as being in breach of Spanish and European environmental protection laws, according to The Diplomat in Spain.
The presence of a Spanish warship is likely to be seen as a provocation both in Gibraltar and London, and will once again raise the thorny issue of the contested waters around the Rock.
It is a flashpoint which comes to the boil each summer, usually when fishing vessels are deemed by one side or the other to have ‘violated sovereign territorial waters.’
But the stakes will be considerably higher with el Rayo in the picture.
Gibraltar claims territorial waters extending three nautical miles (5.5km) into the sea around the peninsula – far less than the 12 nautical miles permitted by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).
But the Spanish contend that, under the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht which ceded Gibraltar to the United Kingdom, the waters were not included and thus remain Spanish.
However, it entails the proposition that someone even swimming in the sea at a Gibraltar beach would technically be violating sovereign Spanish territorial waters.
Nonetheless, the Spanish consider the issue serious enough to turn to gunboat diplomacy.
It comes as the Gibraltar government warned that Spain is already installing the facilities to impose a hard border on the territory once the EU’s new EES (Entry/Exit System) is implemented in November.
Both sides are gearing up for the potential failure of post-Brexit negotiations, which would likely see the end of the current fluid border over which 15,000 people cross a day.
But speaking to GBC regarding the Gibraltar español chants, Chief Minister Fabian Picardo pointed out that such summer tensions with Spain are ‘nothing new.’
“As we come closer to August each year, the Gibraltar issue always comes up,” he said.
“The many very serious issues of politics in Spain disappear from the front pages of the newspapers and the latest Gibraltar nonsense might make it on the front page, playing to the usual prejudices.
“Spanish political parties – particularly on the right – use Gibraltar as a drum with which to bang up support and that’s why we have to call it out every time it happens.”
El Rayo will set sail on July 28 on an approximately 10-day mission before docking in Malaga between August 7 and 9.
