Spain is considering ending an agreement that allows visa-free passage from Moroccan cities to the Spanish North African enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla, a government official was quoted as saying by Reuters, on Friday 11 June. “The government is considering (...) scrapping the special regime”, said Juan González-Barba, State Secretary for the European Union, during a visit to Ceuta the previous day. “The border controls would then move to the border with Morocco” and no longer to the Spanish enclaves. Moroccans from the cities surrounding the enclaves can enter without a visa and in mid-May nearly 10,000 people arrived in Ceuta causing a diplomatic crisis between Madrid and Rabat.
The Moroccan government, for its part, criticised, on 11 June, the resolution adopted the day before by the European Parliament denouncing the use of migration to put pressure on Spain (see EUROPE 12738/10). It “does not change the political nature of the bilateral crisis between Morocco and Spain”, it said in a statement, the crisis having been fuelled by the stay of the Polisario leader in a Spanish hospital for medical treatment. “The instrumentalisation of the European Parliament in this crisis is counterproductive”. The resolution is “out of step with Morocco’s exemplary record of migration cooperation with the European Union. It is the very people who try to criticise Morocco in this field who actually benefit from the concrete and daily results of cooperation on the ground”. (SP)