The jam in the appointments of new ambassadors it has been chronified and last week registered a new milestone. The Minister of Foreign Affairs, Arancha González Laya, has decided to keep Fernando Valderrama Y Luis Felipe Fernández de la Peña at the head of the legations in Russia e Iran Despite the fact that both have reached 70 years of age, the statutory age for retirement of diplomats.
Both ambassadors will remain in Moscow and Tehran “for a little more time“, diplomatic sources point to Vozpópuli, although for them the situation is baffling. Until the middle of last week, at least one of the two mentioned heads of mission had not received a call from Laya’s department to inform him that do not pack for the moment.
Spanish diplomacy currently has three embassies without a holder for the retirement of their heads of mission –India, UK Y Bosnia– so Laya has preferred to keep Russia and Iran covered to do not increase that striking figure in full diplomatic crisis with Morocco and with the unions claiming a vaccination plan against covid for foreign service personnel.
The underlying problem is that Laya does not decide to appoint ambassadors. There is a thirty of destinations to be covered for months, where their holders have already met between three and five years, the length of time that an ambassador usually stays in a position.
Laya has no deadline
The minister is responsible for making appointments and there is no stipulated timetable for it, but the delay when making decisions is generating discomfort and misunderstanding among the members of the Diplomatic Career, given what exceptional of the situation.
For example, the fact that the ambassadors to Russia and Iran are still in office is totally unusual. In the last decades, you can hardly count precedents of this type with the fingers of one hand. The best known case is that of Carlos Westendorp, who in 2006 continued as ambassador to the UN beyond the age of 70, although the Executive of Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero resorted to the BOE to reconfirm at his post before legal doubts that was around article 33 of the Public Function Law 1984, which establishes the forced retirement of civil servants.
During the Government in office Mariano Rajoy, which lasted almost a year, there were five cases of ambassadors whose retirement was postponed since the then Foreign Minister, Jose Manuel Garcia-Margallo, extended the mandate before the impossibility of the Executive in those moments of appointing their substitutes. And now Laya has turned that exception into something normal.
Thus, the minister has kept several ‘retired’ ambassadors in their destinations despite the fact that the Executive is with full powers. It is the case of Gabriel Busquets, who reached 70 years old on April 10 last year but remained ambassador to Sweden until July 21, at which time he was ceased by means of a royal decree published in the BOE.
His stay in Stockholm was then justified by the covid-19 situation, which prevented him from returning to Spain, and then by a Sánchez’s scheduled trip in early July to the Nordic country for a meeting with his Swedish counterpart.
The case of London
The next exception was that of the ambassador to him UK, one of the posts more delicate for Spanish diplomacy. When to Carlos Bastarreche It was time for him to retire, at the end of November, the Government decided that he would remain in London until the conclusion of the Brexit negotiation. His effective output the February 1st of this year. And went to own request from Bastarreche, not because Laya wanted to.
Despite the fact that the Secretary of State for the European Union, Juan Gonzalez-Barba, announced in November at the parliamentary headquarters that the election of his replacement would be known “soon“Months go by – now four – and the Government has not yet sent the British authorities the placet with the name of the Bastarreche relay, so the Spanish Embassy will continue Indefinitely with a charge d’affaires, the diplomat José María Fernández López de Turiso.
Several former Foreign Ministers consulted by Vozpópuli show their strangeness for this fact, right at a time when the UK is giving your first steps outside the EU, when the application of the ‘New Year’s Eve agreement’ on Gibraltar or the tourism sector crosses its fingers that London includes the Spanish territory within the covid green traffic light that you already have Portugal.
Right now, any Briton who comes to Spain has to undergo a 10-day quarantine upon return and undergo two PCRs. Hence it is “more necessary than ever“In the opinion of a predecessor of Laya, the interlocution with the Foreign Office and members of the Cabinet of Boris Johnson to go from amber traffic light to green. A task that a ‘number two’ of the Embassy “can hardly achieve“in a capital as demanding as London, concludes the former minister.
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