Gibraltar National Day 2007
National Day 2007 Message from Joe Bossano - Leader of the GSLP (Gibraltar Socialist Labour Party) Opposition
On Monday, the 10th, Gibraltar’s National Day, we celebrate our separate nationhood as a sovereign people with a right to self-determination. This enables us to make use of this fundamental human right to attain decolonisation and to decide the future international status of our city-state.
What we will not be able to do, yet, is to say that all this has already happened because the UK, as the administering power, continues to report to the United Nations on Gibraltar as it does in respect of all its other overseas territories, as if our international status was no different now, in 2007, to what it has been in the past.
Last year, on the eve of the Referendum, in October, UK once again submitted at the UN a joint statement with Spain requiring our decolonisation to be negotiated between them, in the spirit of the 1984 Brussels Declaration. So far, there is no indication that the same thing will not be repeated this coming October.
If this happens, it raises a serious question mark over what last year’s Referendum achieved. It reinforces Spain’s position at the UN, that the modernization of our constitution has been no different to what is taking place in other British Overseas Territories, which, under international law, all remain listed as colonies.
We made clear a year ago that for us the need for a National Day Political Rally, in the campaign to achieve international recognition of our right to self-determination, was far from over.
In the next couple of months, our parliament comes to the end of its four year life and you will have to choose a new Government. In the choice we put before you we will include a clear cut commitment on the way ahead to complete the exercise of self-determination and the fulfilment of our decolonisation.
The creation of National Day in 1992 marked the 25th anniversary of our rejection of the Spanish claim in the 1967 Referendum and the assertion of our separate identity as a people with the right to our land, all of it, isthmus included.
These rights are still threatened by Spain’s ambitions to take us over and UK’s ambiguity in discharging its obligation to defend us. Whatever may be happening, none of the fundamentals have changed.
We are here today, as we have been in the past and we will be in the future, to defend those rights and maintain that this Rock is ours and Spain will NEVER, EVER, have any say over it.
Long live Gibraltar and its people! Happy National Day!
Source: GSLP (Gibraltar Socialist Labour Party) - Press Release - 06 September 2007
Related Articles and Links:
Gibraltar Constitution Order 2006 - Gibraltar’s new Constitution which came into effect on 2nd January 2007
Chief Minister Peter Caruana’s National Day 2007 Message
National Day 2007 - Statement by Keith Azopardi - Leader of the Progressive Democratic Party
National Day Message from Charles Gomez - Leader of the New Gibraltar Democracy Party
Gibraltar celebrates its National Day 2007
Read more Articles and News reports about or related to the GSLP (Gibraltar Socialist Labour Party)
Read more Articles and News reports about Politics in Gibraltar
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