Argentina reaffirms Malvinas sovereignty rights; invites UK to “good faith” negotiations
Source: MercoPress.com, 21 June 2011.
Foreign Affairs minister Hector Timerman addressing the United Nations Decolonisation Committee reiterated Argentina’s “unrenounceable and imprescriptible” sovereignty rights over the Malvinas Islands and extended a “formal invitation” to the British government “to sit to a table and resume, in good faith, negotiations” to solve the long standing dispute.
Timerman made his Tuesday presentation before the C24 together with a committee of lawmakers from the ruling coalition and the opposition and invited the UK “to sit with us to a table and resume in good faith negotiations to solve the sovereignty dispute so as to put an end, at this time of the XXI century, the incompressible and unacceptable colonial situation”.
“The UK remains dauntless to the calls from the international community”, said Timerman pointing out that this attitude “is even more worrying if we take account of the fact it comes from a member of the UN Security Council, whose main purpose is the preservation of international peace and security”.
“We Argentines insist in calling for peaceful negotiations because it is history which teaches that the sole expression of the powerful is not enough to justify a territorial occupation born out of an act of force, since be it not so, several of the nations that today are members of this committee would continue to be colonial enclaves”.
Furthermore the Argentine minister denounced before the C24 “the criminal attitude from fanatics who death threatened” the British descendent born in the Malvinas Islands, James Peck, “if he dared return to the Islands”.
Given the facts, “we make British authorities that illegally occupy the Islands responsible for the safety of the Argentine citizen, Señor James Peck, if he wishes to exercise his Argentine rights to return to the occupied Islands”, underlined Timerman.
James Peck, 42, is a successful artist who was married with an Argentine woman with whom he had two children. In an interview this week with The Times, Peck said he had not given up his British citizenship and wanted to live next to his children. Holding a British passport in Argentina exposed him to “hostility and bureaucratic difficulties”.
“I’m not going to leave my children because of the dispute of two governments over the Falklands/Malvinas” Peck told The Times.
See Minister Hector Timerman statement here (pdf/espanol).
