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Once again, the Spanish government is forced to justify its position regarding the petroleum exploration authorized by Morocco near the Canary Islands. For the time being, the Spanish Minister of Foreign Affairs has been occupied with the task of tackling this very sensitive subject.
«Morocco has the right to manage its territory and its resources in the way it considers appropriate», said on Tuesday Alfonso María Dastis Quecedo, a Spanish diplomat, currently serving as Minister of Foreign Affairs of Spain, in the parliament, responding to a question asked by a Podemos member.
«Development and prosperity in Morocco are legitimate objectives that Spain should share and encourage», for the sake of citizens in the region, he added, as reported by Europa Press.
Podemos, ecology and the Western Sahara question
However, Dastis’ claims did not really convince the Podemos MP. She believes that the waters between Tan-Tan and Sidi Ifni which are subjected to the exploration works conducted by the Italian company ENI are part of the «zone taken away from the Sahrawi people». And to back her statement the MP added saying that the Moroccan decision would «violate the 2015 agreement» which marks the demarcation of maritime borders between Morocco and Spain.
However, the two parties never concluded the document related to this issue. In fact, during a meeting organized on the 29th of September 2005 in Seville both Driss Jettou and José Zapatero held talks without reaching an agreement. On the 11th of May 2009, Madrid requested a UN intervention to find a final solution for the problem.
Fortunately Alfonso Dastis intervened to make up for the mistakes made by the Podemos member. He recalled that the two neighbors have not yet defined their maritime borders and instead operate according to the «equidistance principle». Giving more details, he insisted that according to «this principle, its waters are incontestably under Moroccan jurisdiction».
On January the 30th,and in a press release, Dastis claimed that Rabat has given guarantees to Madrid that all drilling operations «will be conducted within its Moroccan territorial waters».
