EMEA News
496 Spanish Incursions into Gibraltar Waters Reported in 2013
The UK Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO) says there were 496 Spanish incursions into Gibraltar waters last year, the Gibraltar Chronicle reports.
"The Royal Navy upholds British sovereignty by challenging all unlawful incursions by vessels of the Spanish State through radio warnings and the close monitoring of all such vessels until they leave British Gibraltar Territorial Waters," a spokesman for the office said.
"Although unlawful incursions are a violation of British sovereignty, they are not a threat to it."
The UK newspaper the Sunday Telegraph previously reported that there were 446 such incidents, which would still be a record, at nearly twice the 2012 tally.
"Such incursions are a misguided attempt to maintain and assert Spanish claims that the waters are Spanish," an FCO spokesman said.
"However, we have always been confident of UK sovereignty over British Gibraltarian Territorial Waters."
Tensions between the UK and Spain over Gibraltar's sovereignty intensified in 2013 and have threatened to impact bunkering in the region.
In August Spanish foreign minister Jose Manuel Garcia Margallo denounced bunkering off Gibraltar as environmentally harmful and called on the UK to "resume bilateral negotiations as soon as possible on issues of Gibraltar's sovereignty."
"With more than 100,000 ships crossing the Strait of Gibraltar each year, it's the 7th biggest bunker market in the world at around 7 million tonnes a year," a local supplier told Ship & Bunker.
