THURSDAY, March 28, 2024
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Papal intervention can work for Spain’s secession crisis

Papal intervention can work for Spain’s secession crisis

Re: “Catalonia stands no chance against the rise of EU army”, Have Your Say, yesterday.

Mr Wilcox’s dismissal of mediation by the Roman Catholic Church in the Catalonian crisis as ludicrous is not borne out by recent history. Pope John Paul ll acted as arbitrator in the Beagle conflict, a border dispute between Argentina and Chile. On January 9, 1979, Chile and Argentina signed the Act of Montevideo formally requesting mediation by the Vatican and renouncing the use of force. After some years of negotiation a treaty was signed which defined the border.
Similar calls for Papal mediation have been made by an opposition leader in strongly Catholic Venezuela. If the discussions between Madrid and Barcelona become deadlocked then the need for international mediation will become very necessary.    
The Western European Union may have had four members but the original European Economic Community had six. The Treaty of Rome 1957 states in its preamble that it is “determined to lay the foundations of an ever closer union among the peoples of Europe”. Many in Britain in 1975 were not aware of this clearly stated intention or of the institutions that existed in Europe. They were not voting for a free-trade treaty. Indeed Britain was a co-founder of the European Free Trade Association – EFTA.
Many in today’s Britain are unaware that the EU will not sign any treaty with the UK to allow tariff-free access to the EU internal market without the necessary payments to Brussels.
Ian Martin
Bangkok 

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