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BREXIT

Brits in Spain hope for dual citizenship legislation in 2019

UK nationals in Spain are concerned about the ongoing campaign for joint citizenship, as well as how Spain will avoid hundreds of thousands of Brits from becoming illegal residents overnight in the case of a no-deal Brexit.

Published: 8 January 2019 14:56 CET
Updated: 10 January 2019 10:59 CET
Brits in Spain hope for dual citizenship legislation in 2019
Photo: ruskpp/Depositphotos

A key hurdle for Brits looking to become Spanish is the Iberian nation’s strict rules on dual citizenship. Under current Spanish law, Brits cannot officially obtain Spanish citizenship and retain their British passport.

Only countries that came under the 16th century kingdom of Philip II, and a few groups in other exceptions – including Sephardic Jews – can hold dual citizenship in Spain.

This prevents nearly 50,000 Brits who live in Spain, pay their taxes and make regular social security contributions from applying for citizenship, states a recent report by citizens' rights group EuroCitizens.

“We encourage the Spanish government to consider facilitating, by means of a special and limited piece of legislation, double citizenship for Brits who can prove they have lived and/or worked in Spain for 10 years,” states a December 2018 report by Madrid-based lobby group for UK nationals in Spain EuroCitizens.

Giles Tremlett, a Guardian journalist who launched a campaign shortly after the Brexit referendum to encourage Spain to allow Brits to hold both British and Spanish citizenship, is still pushing for that objective.

“Joint nationality would express my cultural reality,” Tremlett, who has been based in Madrid for 25 years, told The Local. The author, who says he is “bilingual and biculturual,”  says he has an added incentive in fighting to obtain citizenship for his children. 

Tremlett and EuroCitizens’ campaign hopes to help around 50,000 Brits who have been resident in Spain for a long time – the proposed residency duration criteria is either five or ten years – to apply for a Spanish passport.

An author of historical biographies, Tremlett says he hopes the regional governments in Valencia and Andalusia, where there are large communities of settled Brits, can be convinced to discuss the issue.

Tremlett, EuroCitizens and colleagues have already drafted the legal text. All that remains is for a party in one of those regional administrations to endorse it politically.

If that were to happen, the regional administrations could then send the law on to Madrid for review at a national level.

The number of Brits applying for Spanish citizenship has nevertheless more than tripled since 2015. 166 Britons requested Spanish citizenship in the first 10 months of 2018 alone.

Waiting times however can be long. Tremlett says he applied for his Spanish passport just six months ago. Michael Harris from EuroCitizens has been waiting for years. 

READ ALSO: Brexit: New data reveals surge in Brits applying for Spanish citizenship

More than a quarter of all the registered Brits in the EU27 live in Spain. Unlike Brits in Germany, France or Italy, who have been given some reassurances, UK nationals in Spain still await news of how their futures in the Iberian country could continue should the United Kingdom crash out of the EU without a deal that would govern their future rights.

Spanish PM Sanchez has said that it will publish contingency plans for a no-deal Brexit in February and urged British nationals not to worry about their futures.

“I want to send a message of calm to Spaniards who live in Britain and also to Britons who live in Spain: their rights will be maintained whatever the scenario,” Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez told a year-end news conference following a weekly cabinet meeting.

Official figures say there are 314,000 Brits in Spain.  According to Michael Harris from Madrid-based citizens' rights organisation EuroCitizens, February is too late – such guidelines could have been published earlier, Harris told The Local. 

“The British community needs to know sooner rather than later how this change will be made and what documentation Brits will have to provide to be able to continue residing legally,” states a December 2018 report by EuroCitizens and British in Europe.

Spain has said that the rights of Brits will be protected but it remains unclear what Brits will have to do to reside in the country after Brexit, which changes their automatic right to be living there. 

Governments in Italy, France, Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands have all now published, or made clear, contingency motions for British nationals living in those countries.

If the UK self-implodes in the coming weeks and exits the EU with no deal that outlines the rights of its citizens living throughout the 27-country political bloc, Brits in Spain will have to hope the Spanish government will be accommodating. EU Commission no-deal contingency guidelines from November 2018 state:

“It has always been the European Union's intention that citizens should not pay the price of Brexit. This will require Member States to take a generous approach to the rights of UK citizens who are already resident in their territory.”

READ ALSO: An open letter from the British ambassador to British citizens living in Spain

Harris told the Local in early January 2019 that it is vital that Brits are given time to prepare for any change of residency status, as outlined by Article 17.4 in the Withdrawal Agreement.

Many Brits are also worried what the potential forthcoming Spanish legislation could mean for their lives. “We want to see what they’ll do with us if there’s a no-deal Brexit,” EuroCitizens founder and British in Europe steering committee member Michael Harris told The Local.

The fear of becoming what some have described as “third country nationals overnight” concerns the Spanish contingent of citizen-focused groups.

Debbie Williams, a British resident of northern Valencia and founder of Brexpats Hear Our Voice, says there are key concerns for Brits in the case of a no-deal exit from the bloc.

One is that British citizens who are not employed may not be able to meet the financial criteria required as “economically inactive” people. In other words, unemployed Brits will have to demonstrate an income of €26,500 per year. This will affect pensioners and economically vulnerable groups, says Williams.

READ ALSO: 'No deal' Brexit could leave British pensioners in Spain reliant on NHS

Unsurprisingly, some of the first and most active voices and groups expressing concerns about the rights of British nationals in Europe vis-a-vis Brexit emerged from Spain.

Three out of ten core founding member groups of pan-European rights group British in Europe are based in Spain: Bremain in Spain, Brexpats in Spain and EuroCitizens. Each group has its own focus. 

EuroCitizens is now in touch with the office of Vice President Carmen Calvo Poyato, head of the inter-ministerial committee mandated with managing any eventualities or contingency plans in the case of a no-deal Brexit. In other words, the woman most Brits in Spain right now hope could secure their rights.

A recent EuroCitizens paper looks at the impact a soft and a hard (no-deal) Brexit could have on Brits in Spain, the third largest group of migrants in the country after Moroccans and Romanians. From coast to coast and throughout Spain’s islands, the British community in Spain is the largest of any in the EU. 

Nearly half of the total number are people of working age and their families, situated in the capital Madrid or major provincial cities. The other half are pensioners living mainly in the coastal areas or islands, according to statistics from Spain’s statistics office INE.

READ MORE: Gibraltar rejects joint sovereignty talk 'as dead as a dodo'
 

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GIBRALTAR

Why has Gibraltar still not reached a Brexit deal with Spain?

With yet another round of Spain-UK negotiations set to begin more than eight years since the Brexit referendum, Gibraltar is still without a deal and a November deadline looms over any treaty. Why has it proven so hard to break the deadlock?

Published: 17 September 2024 13:38 CEST
Why has Gibraltar still not reached a Brexit deal with Spain?

On Thursday September 19th, Spain and the UK resume talks on Gibraltar’s post-Brexit status, and has been the case since 2016, uncertainty is still the prevailing feeling.

The British Foreign Secretary David Lammy recently received his Spanish counterpart, José Manuel Albares in London. Both did their diplomatic duties and talked up the prospects of a deal, with Lammy stating he hoped for an agreement that would ensure greater “prosperity and security for the people of Gibraltar.”

Albares, for his part, understandably centred any hypothetical deal on a “shared prosperity between Gibraltar and the 300,000 Andalusians connected every day in their normal lives”.

READ ALSO: Gibraltar demands Spain return stolen concrete block in new diplomatic spat

Though Lammy and Albares discussed the Rock, no formal negotiations or deal can be struck without EU oversight, so the meeting also included discussion of bilateral issues and international concerns such as the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East.

The meeting between the two Ministers was therefore a preamble to yet more formal treaty negotiations in Brussels on Thursday. Since Brexit came into effect at the end of 2020, Gibraltar has essentially existed in legal limbo with no formal treaty.

Border controls have been fudged ever since, leaving locals and Spaniards across the border faced with inconsistent rules and forcing travellers to find creative ways to bypass rules and get over ‘La Línea’. 

Why hasn’t a deal been reached?

So why all the meetings and pre-meetings and endless rounds of negotiations? How is it possible that Gibraltar is still without a Brexit deal all these years later?

A recent piece in El País by Rafa de Miguel, the daily’s UK and Ireland correspondent, perhaps put it best: “The amount of warm words in any political statement is inversely proportional to the progress in the negotiations.”

The reality is that, however many handshakes and photo opportunities and positive attitudes expressed between Spain and the UK on a bilateral level, these are ultimately irrelevant as nothing can be signed without the EU’s approval. 

This is further complicated by the fact that this makes any deal dependent on four way negotiations between Spain, the UK, the EU, and Gibraltar.

Each of these parties has their own individual set of needs, preferences and motivations. The EU won’t want to be seen to give Gibraltar, and by extension the UK, any special treatment for fear of emboldening other member states who desire bespoke arrangements when it comes to border controls and customs checks.

In light of Germany recently reimplementing land border checks, something some say is a direct violation of Schengen rules, this will be especially sensitive in these latest rounds of negotiations. 

Spain has long made territorial claims on Gibraltar dating back to the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht, when the overseas territory was first ceded to the UK, and will want to come out of negotiations with something that can be perceived as a political victory, likely an increased Spanish role in border patrols.

Fabian Picardo, Gibraltar’s Chief Minister, has ruled this out definitively over the last few years, citing concerns about British sovereignty.

The UK government in London will also have worries about British sovereignty, but will balance this with the knowledge that Gibraltar negotiations are also an opportunity to reset relations with Europe more widely, something the new Starmer government has repeatedly stated since coming into power.

READ ALSO: ‘It’s time to reset Britain’s relations with Europe’, says UK foreign secretary

Some reports, however, suggest that despite the positive musings coming from London, negotiations have stalled and that Lammy has no intention of signing anything that would deviate from Gibraltar’s needs and concerns.

Political tensions were increased recently when Gibraltar demanded Spanish far-right party Vox return a concrete block stolen from British waters, and the Euro 2024 winning Spanish football team made international headlines when it celebrating by singing ‘Gibraltar es Español’ (Gibraltar is Spanish).

READ ALSO: ‘Gibraltar is Spanish!’: How Spain celebrated Euro 2024 heroes

Despite wanting to improve relations with the EU, Lammy is expected to reiterate the Labour government’s unwavering commitment to the “double lock” on sovereignty, sources told El País.

Perhaps most pressingly, however, is the fact that these new negotiations now have a deadline: the enforcement of new Schengen Area border rules come into force on November 10th and a treaty must be finalised before then. 

READ MORE: Hard border? What we know so far about new Gibraltar-Spain checks

Schengen Zone rules mean that there are two major outstanding points in treaty negotiations: firstly, the sore point of Spanish border guards on British soil, something Gibraltar rejects outright, and also the question of who would run Gibraltar’s airport, which is located on the isthmus between Spain and the British territory, an area Madrid claims was never included in Treaty of Utrecht.

The most contested aspect of negotiations is Madrid’s demand that Spanish agents should be allowed to carry out checks on passengers arriving at Gibraltar airport and that they should be armed and in uniform.

For many Llanitos (Gibraltar locals) this is an intolerable idea and one Picardo rejects outright: “There will be no Spanish boots on the ground,” he has said repeatedly.

On the other hand, Spain argues that no specific protocol can be designed for Gibraltar and that if it wants to join the border-free European area, it must accept Schengen rules.

Spanish boots on British soil is a particularly visceral point for many Gibraltarians of a certain age. In June 1969, Spanish dictator Francisco Franco closed the border gate between Gibraltar and La Línea de la Concepción, cutting the tiny overseas territory off from the world, separating Spanish-British families and forcing Gibraltar to source food from elsewhere on the planet. 

It was eventually reopened in December in 1982 but those 13 years have taken deep root in Gibraltar’s historical memory and is now embedded into the Llanito collective imagination and identity.

For many on ‘The Rock’, the idea of Spanish border guards on British soil, whether it be in the airport or elsewhere, is simply unacceptable under any circumstances. 

Tax could also prove to be a sticking point. Gibraltar has no VAT, but Madrid has argued that if it wants to benefit from fluid border movement, its tax rules must be brought into line with EU rules.

Of course, there’s also both the domestic and international geopolitical contexts to consider here too. All parties – Spain, the UK, Gibraltar and the EU – have been distracted by other events in recent years.

Spain has been preoccupied by political tension, snap elections and the Catalan amnesty, while Britain suffered the almost cartoonish political instability of the outgoing Conservative government and treaty talks were postponed after the general election in July.

Added to this is the fact that the mediating party, the EU, has had its hands full with the war in Ukraine and surging far-right parties across member states, a trend that interestingly both the UK and Spain buck as the only major European states with centre-left governments.

Talks resume on Thursday September 19th, over 8 years since the Brexit referendum.

In British politics, the UK’s exit from the EU now seems strangely absent from debate, as though the issue is over and the country has finally begun to move on — but for Gibraltarians and the thousands of Spaniards who cross the border and work there everyday, Brexit is still an open-ended question.

READ ALSO: ‘Starting now’: New UK govt wastes no time in Gibraltar post-Brexit talks with Spain

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