SDGG Chairman calls on UN 4th Committee to look, listen & act

The Chairman of the Self Determination for Gibraltar Group has called on the Committee not to take anyone’s side but to look, listen and act.

Richard Buttigieg said the Treaty is an example of what is possible when people choose to work together.

The recent agreement, he said, proves that progress is possible and that perhaps now was the time for the United Nations to show it too can progress and complete the UN work on decolonisation that remains unfinished.

Richard Buttigieg told the UN the agreement carries an important lesson for the Committee, because it shows that when people sit around a table in good faith, listen to one another and truly look for practical solutions, they can achieve things that once seemed extremely difficult (if not impossible).

The fact that Gibraltar remains on the United Nations list of Non-Self-Governing Territories, he said, is still a part of Gibraltar’s story which remains unresolved.

And again he asked what the United Nations was waiting for to remove Gibraltar from a list created almost eighty years ago.

"And I have to ask: after all these years, what exactly is the United Nations waiting for?

The people of Gibraltar have built democratic institutions.

We govern ourselves.

We take responsibility for our own affairs.

And generation after generation of Gibraltarians have made their wishes known.

Yet we remain on a list created more than seventy years ago.

Mr Chairman, that list is supposed to describe reality.

But when reality changes, surely the list must change too."

Richard Buttigieg again also extended an invitation for the UN to send a visiting mission and see for itself the Gibraltar that exists today and for the Committee to say what the Rock still needed to do to be delisted. 

If there was nothing else Gibraltar could do, he said, the time has come to act because the next generation must be able to look back and say:

They finally listened. They finally came. And they finally finished the job.