The Plenary of the Cabildo of Lanzarote has approved this Friday as an institutional declaration the motion of the Canarian Coalition rejecting the "unilateral decision of the Kingdom of Morocco to unduly appropriate, through two laws", the waters of Western Sahara. "A decision that automatically affects the jurisdictional waters of the Canary Islands", they emphasize.
“There are doubts as to whether any of the authorizations made by Morocco are located in our jurisdictional waters. Spain and Morocco have been unable to fix the median line with the Canary Islands and, on the other hand, it is more than likely that the projects granted by Morocco in the waters of Western Sahara are located in the Spanish EEZ”, said the CC-PNC councilor, Migdalia Machín.
The initiative of the nationalists, assumed as an institutional declaration by all the groups that make up the plenary, proposes that the Government of the Canary Islands and the Government of the State be urged to denounce the situation before the competent bodies of the United Nations and that an investigation be opened on the oil and gas explorations authorized by Morocco, “to verify if any of them affect our territorial waters and also demand that the concessionaire companies comply with the protocols required in environmental matters”, as Machín has stressed.
"We do not know if the Government of Spain has opened a negotiation with Morocco to demand the maximum environmental guarantees from the companies to which it has granted hydrocarbon research permits. Any incident that may occur in the arm of the sea that separates us would have serious consequences for the Canarian marine environment”, they warn.
Finally, the CC motion proposes that the development of a joint agenda “to promote clean energies in our maritime geographical space as an alternative to the exploration and extraction of gas and hydrocarbons” be included as a "priority issue" in bilateral relations with Morocco.
