Gibraltar vote will show it is not a colony, minister says

UNITED NATIONS - An upcoming referendum on a new constitution for Gibraltar will show it is no longer a colony, the territory's Chief Minister Peter Caruana has said.

"Our new constitution has been negotiated by us and agreed with the United Kingdom.

"We shall soon put it to the people of Gibraltar in a referendum, which is an act of self-determination," Caruana told a UN committee on decolonisation on Tuesday local time.

The rocky outcropping on Spain's south coast has been at the centre of a long sovereignty dispute between Britain and Spain. Britain seized Gibraltar nearly three centuries ago and calls it a British colony but Spain contests its rule.

Nearly 99 per cent of Gibraltar's 18,000 people voted in a November 2002 referendum against Britain giving Spain a share of sovereignty.

But the UN General Assembly's special committee on decolonisation has kept Gibraltar on its list of "non-self governing territories".

Caruana told the panel that if the people of Gibraltar voted to adopt the new constitution, "you should cease to consider the case of Gibraltar and recommend to the General Assembly that we should be delisted."

The new constitution, he insisted, was "not colonial in nature." "It provides for almost total self-government, reserving as it does to the UK responsibility only for defence, external affairs and national security," he said.

"It is therefore not self-government - but no objective observer would regard the relationship that it regulates as colonial in nature," he said.

Britain and Spain have been in talks this year in search of practical steps they could take to improve their strained relations over Gibraltar.

The two countries agreed in October 2004 to address practical issues in a process that would run parallel to discussions on the territory's sovereignty.

- REUTERS