The Minister of Foreign Affairs, Arancha González Laya, told the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee today that, in the event that the United Kingdom maintain its quarantine of travellers from Spain after June 22, the Spanish Government will consider imposing the same measure in “reciprocity”.
In an interview with the BBC the minister said “We will be checking what the United Kingdom is going to do and we will have a dialogue with them to see whether or not we should introduce the same measure for Britons coming into Spain because they have different measures from the rest of the European Union.”
González Laya said that the member countries of the European Union and the Schengen borderless area have decided that they will remove all quarantine measures when they reopen the borders. “We will have them until June 22 but we will withdraw them on June 22. If the United Kingdom wants to keep them after that date, for reasons to do with its own vision of health, we will respect it but we will probably decide to here in Spain to visitors from the UK.”
“In other words, everything is a moving object that we have to keep adjusting, with the most important ingredient being making sure that we respect what scientists tell us and that we act accordingly,” he added.
She told the Spanish press that this “is an option” to be considered. “It is an option if we believe that it is necessary to guarantee the health and safety of those British travellers who come to Spain,” she said.
However, the minister has made it clear that the situation is “very fluid”, so she considered that “better than speculating” the Spanish Government would prefer “to enter into dialogue with the UK authorities to guarantee” that the two countries adopt “the measures that best correspond to the health situation”.
The minister has said that the health situation “today is a little better in Spain than in the United Kingdom” but she trusted that when the borders are opened, “the United Kingdom will also have improved its situation”.
