Opposition & Government clash over EES de-registration issues

The Opposition claims that instead of washing its hands of the travel problems Gibraltar residents are encountering, the Government should have pre-empted these issues and now be pro-actively dealing with the problems.

It says the issues raised, again, suggest a sign of shambolic preparation on a crucial aspect of the Treaty deal that goes well beyond simple teething problems.

For its part, Number Six states the Opposition’s comments betray a distinct lack of knowledge on the subject as well as a continued willingness to adopt a negative and destructive stance on almost every subject.

 It says the EES is unrelated to the Gibraltar treaty with thousands all over Europe and elsewhere who may find they have an EES entry and not an exit, as until recently border guards were given the power to override the system during busy periods at border crossing points.

The GSD says the Government’s Technical Notice puts citizens on the front-line of having to resolve de-registration issues rather than pro-actively resolving issues with the system it was intimately involved in designing.  

The Opposition points out it questioned the 90-day restriction which it believed would provide a hurdle to proper movement across the Schengen area.

It feels what we are seeing now not only confirms that concern but also shines a spotlight on the fact that the Government was unprepared to deal with what, it believes, are obvious scenarios of difficulties that would arise across the EU.

It adds that rather than asking citizens to try to resolve these issues with each individual country, over the many years of negotiations, the Government should have pre-empted the obvious questions and have arranged solutions with the European Commission. Equally, it says, the Government should be acting as a central secretariat to pass details of wrongly logged citizens to the EU so that these could be removed by individual EU countries instead of asking citizens to deal with it themselves. 

The Leader of the Opposition says these issues must have been obvious during the negotiations.  Keith Azopardi says this is just a further example of a GSLP Government desperately playing catch-up on Treaty implementation and not being sufficiently prepared for obvious issues while citizens suffer the pain or anxiety of travel disruption.  He believes the issue of EES de-registration is just one of a number of foreseeable post-Treaty travel problems for Gibraltar residents which should have been anticipated by the Government and in respect of which solutions should already have been put in place or risks minimised.

And the Government reiterates the EU had already established Europe-wide solutions for persons who find themselves in this predicament with Gibraltar card holders falling under exactly the same framework.  It says the procedure is the same for everybody else, everywhere else and has been in place ever since the EES came into effect.

The Government says it was willing to consider acting as an interface between Gibraltar residents and the EESauthorities with a reluctance on the other side to go down this route for EU data protection reasons. 

It claims it has been extremely proactive in keeping residents of Gibraltar fully informed at every stage in the process, through the publication of detailed information on the subject, adding it's a nonsense for the Opposition to maintain otherwise. 

The Commission, it says, has insisted Gibraltar uses the same channels which are in existence for everyone else, and which were already in place while the treaty was being negotiated. It, adds, it's therefore absurd to describe the situation as playing catch-up when the process was already there.

Sadly, it says, all this shows is that the Opposition has no concept of the national interest and will not hesitate to play politics with every issue no matter how serious it might be.