Judiciary of Gibraltar
The judiciary of Gibraltar is a branch of the Government of Gibraltar that interprets and applies the law of Gibraltar, to ensure equal justice under law, to provide a mechanism for dispute resolution. The legal system of Gibraltar is a mix of common law and statute; the hierarchical system of courts includes a magistrates' court, a supreme court and a non-resident appellate court. The highest Court of Appeal for Gibraltar is the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in London, able to hear appeals from the Gibraltar Court of Appeal. In relation to matters of European Community Law, the European Court of Justice is the highest authority; the next highest Court is the Court of Appeal. This Court is composed of an odd number of judges not fewer than three; the Chief Justice is an ex-officio member of the Court of Appeal but may not hear appeals of his own decisions. The Supreme Court is composed of four judges — the Chief Justice and a further 3 puisne judges appointed by the Governor; the Court hears civil and criminal proceedings, including Family Jurisdiction, Court of Protection, Admiralty Jurisdiction and Ordinary Jurisdiction.
The Supreme Court hears appeals from the Magistrates' Court. The lower courts are the Coroner's Court and the Magistrates' Court — this court hears criminal and family cases. Below the Magistrates' Court, there are tribunals for social security and employment matters. New courts were opened in September 2012 by the Minister of Justice Gilbert Licudi; the new purpose-built building houses seven courts, one for a Coroner, two for Magistrates and four supreme courts. Gibraltar Courts Service Organisation of Justice in Gibraltar
Gibraltar 2
Gibraltar 2 known as Devil's Tower Child, represented five skull fragments of a female Neanderthal child discovered in the British Overseas Territory of Gibraltar. The discovery of the fossils at the Devil's Tower Mousterian rock shelter was made by archaeologist Dorothy Garrod in 1926, it represented the second excavation of a Neanderthal skull in Gibraltar, after Gibraltar 1, the second Neanderthal skull found. In the early twenty-first century, Gibraltar 2 underwent reconstruction. Prehistoric man resided in Gibraltar, the British Overseas Territory at the southern end of the Iberian Peninsula; the evidence was first found in the Devil's Tower Road area, at Forbes' Quarry, in the north face of the Rock of Gibraltar. This was the site of the 1848 discovery of the first Neanderthal skull by Lieutenant Edmund Flint of the Royal Artillery; the fossil, an adult female skull, is referred to as the Gibraltar Skull. Neanderthals were unknown at the time. Lieutenant Flint, secretary of the Gibraltar Scientific Society, presented his discovery to the organisation on 3 March 1848.
Eight years in 1856, fossils were discovered in a cave of the Neander Valley near Düsseldorf, Germany. Those remains were described in 1864 as Homo neanderthalensis by Professor William King of Queen's College, now University College; that year, the Gibraltar Skull was sent to England and exhibited by George Busk at the meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, with its similarity to the Neander Valley fossils noted. However, it wasn't until the early twentieth century that it was realized that Gibraltar 1 was the skull of a Neanderthal. If the skull's significance had been understood in the nineteenth century, Neanderthal Man would have been termed "Gibraltar Man". Additional evidence of Neanderthal occupation in Gibraltar was found at the Devil's Tower Mousterian rock shelter at the north face of the Rock of Gibraltar. Devil's Tower was a seventeenth century watchtower, located at the eastern end of Devil's Tower Road; the archaeological site was discovered by Abbé Henri Édouard Prosper Breuil, who had recommended investigation.
Breuil, a French paleontologist and archaeologist, is renowned for his expertise on prehistoric cave art. The excavations at the Devil's Tower cave started in November 1925 and continued until December 1926 in three phases. In 1926, the skull of a Neanderthal child was discovered by archaeologist Dorothy Garrod. Garrod, who had studied with Breuil in Paris, went on to perform archaeological excavations in France, Palestine and Bulgaria, she was the first female professor at the University of Oxford. In addition, in 1939, Garrod was elected to the Disney Chair. Garrod found five skull fragments which were described by the archaeologist and others in The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland in 1928; the five fragments were maxillary, temporal and mandibular. Mousterian flake stone tools were found near the child's remains; the skull of the female Neanderthal child is known as Devil's Tower Child. In a study described in 1993 in the Journal of Human Evolution, the striation pattern of the dental enamel of the Devil's Tower Child fossil was compared to that of modern hunter-gatherers and medieval individuals from Spain.
It was found. Gibraltar 2 had a high number of striations. Further, the ratio of horizontal to vertical striations suggested that Gibraltar 2 may have been carnivorous; the child is estimated to have been about four years old at the time of death. By 2008, the face of the Devil's Tower Child had been reconstructed at the University of Zurich by means of computer-assisted paleoanthropology; this involved using computed tomography to perform volume data acquisition of the five skull fragments unearthed by Garrod in 1926. The five cranial fragments were transformed with the software FoRM-IT into virtual 3D images. With the five virtual images suspended in anatomical space according to scientific criteria, the missing fragments were replaced with mirror images of the excavated fragments. By means of laser stereolithography, the virtual reconstruction of the face and skull of the Devil's Tower Child was converted to a physical model; the soft tissues were approximated using 3D Thin Plate Splining with data from a modern child.
Plasticine modelling clay was accordingly applied on the physical model to simulate soft tissue. The final model of Gibraltar 2 was cast. At the end of the 20th century, it was believed that the Neanderthals disappeared c. 35,000 years ago. In 2006, radiocarbon dating of charcoal from Gorham's Cave, suggested that Neanderthals survived in southern Spain and Gibraltar at least to 28,000 BP, well after the arrival of Homo sapiens in Europe c. 45,000 years ago. More new decontaminated radiocarbon dating suggests Neanderthals had vacated Gibraltar by 42,000 BP, earlier than elsewhere in Europe. Computer-Assisted Paleoanthropology of Gibraltar 2
Gibraltar 1
Gibraltar 1 is the specimen name of a Neanderthal skull known as the Gibraltar Skull found at Forbes' Quarry in Gibraltar and presented to the Gibraltar Scientific Society by its Secretary, Lieutenant Edmund Henry Réné Flint on 3 March 1848. Its discovery predates that of the original Neanderthal discovery. Found more than ten years before the publication of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species and eight years prior to the famous discovery in the Neander Valley, the significance of the find was not understood at the time, the skull was labelled as "an ancient human, died before the universal flood" and lay forgotten inside a cupboard at the Garrison Library for many years. After the publication of Origin of Species, a renewed interest in the fossil human remains led to the skull being brought out of obscurity and presented at a meeting in the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1864. Darwin was not present, but the skull was examined by both Darwin and Thomas Huxley, who concluded the skull was that of an extinct human species.
Darwin did. A cast of the skull can be viewed at the Gibraltar Museum – the original is on display in the Human Evolution gallery of the Natural History Museum in London; the original find was done in a time where the palaeontological dating was still in its infancy, no stratigraphic information was supplied with the skull, making dating at best guesswork. Another specimen from a different locale on Gibraltar has however been dated to between 30 thousand to 50 thousand years old; the skull is that of an adult woman with typical Neanderthal features. While the skull was one of the first to be found, it was possibly from one of the last surviving Neanderthal populations; until the late twentieth century, it was believed that the last Neanderthals disappeared about 35,000 years ago. However, studies have suggested that Neanderthals survived in southern Iberia and Gibraltar to less than 30,000 years before the present. Radiocarbon dating performed on charcoal in Gorham's Cave in Gibraltar in 2006 suggests that Neanderthals lived there 24,000 to 28,000 years ago, well after the arrival of Homo sapiens in Europe 40,000 years ago.
Vanguard Cave and Gorham's Cave are still the sites of active archaeological excavation in 2012. These caves may have represented the refugium of Gibraltar's Neanderthals. Engis 2 Gibraltar 2 Neanderthal Neanderthal 1 List of fossil sites List of human evolution fossils History of Gibraltar
Fifth Siege of Gibraltar
The Fifth Siege of Gibraltar, mounted between August 1349 and March 1350, was a second attempt by King Alfonso XI of Castile to retake the fortified town of Gibraltar. It had been held by the Moors since 1333; the siege followed years of intermittent conflict between the Christian kingdoms of Spain and the Moorish Emirate of Granada, supported by the Marinid sultanate of Morocco. A series of Moorish defeats and reverses had left Gibraltar as a Moorish-held enclave within Castilian territory, its geographical isolation was compensated for by the strength of its fortifications, improved since 1333. Alfonso brought an army of around 20,000 men, along with his mistress and their five illegitimate children, to dig in to the north of Gibraltar for a lengthy siege. In the New Year of 1350, bubonic plague – the Black Death – broke out in the Castilian camp. Alfonso refused to abandon the siege but fell victim to the plague on 27 March 1350, becoming the only monarch to die of the disease. Alfonso XI had attempted to retake Gibraltar in the Fourth Siege of 1333 after the fortified town had been captured by the Moors in the Third Siege, but had been forced to withdraw after two months of siege warfare.
Peace was temporarily restored through a four-year truce that expired in 1338. After resuming the conflict in 1339, the Moors suffered major reverses. A Moroccan army under Abd al-Malik Abd al-Wahid was wiped out by the Castilians in 1339 while in 1340 a much bigger army under Yusuf I of Granada and Sultan Abu al-Hasan Ali ibn Othman of Morocco was destroyed in the Battle of Río Salado by a Christian army representing all the Christian Spanish kingdoms and Portugal, it was one of the largest battles of the Reconquista with as many as 150,000–200,000 men on each side. Although the defeat left Moorish Andalusia vulnerable, the Christian kingdoms did not press their advantage and gave the Moors time to rebuild their forces. In August 1342, Alfonso XI laid siege to the strategic port of Algeciras on the western side of the Bay of Gibraltar with a Castilian naval force blockading the city's access to the sea; the twenty-month siege was notable for its use of cannon by the Moors. Although they succeeded in holding off the Castilians, neither side was able to gain the upper hand until the Castilian fleet managed to lay a boom across the entrance to the harbour of Algeciras, completing the blockade.
With the garrison now cut off, Yusuf I accepted defeat in March 1344 and proposed a fifteen-year truce in exchange for the surrender of Algeciras, permitting the garrison to withdraw peacefully, the resumption of tribute payments by Granada to Castile. Alfonso XI reduced the truce period to ten years; the truce only lasted until 1348 when Abu al-Hasan Ali ibn Othman was overthrown by his son Abu Inan Faris. Yusuf I resumed hostilities with a raid against Castilian territory; this gave Alfonso XI the opportunity to declare to the Castilian Cortes in December 1348 that he would march against Gibraltar, by now a Moorish enclave within Castilian-held territory. It was not an easy target. Many of the weaknesses, exposed in the sieges of 1333, such as a lack of fortifications in the south of Gibraltar, had been remedied. Alfonso XI launched his expedition in August 1349, having made extensive preparations to ensure that he would not face the problems that had doomed his 1333 attempt, he raised money through three extraordinary levies, obtaining shares of ecclesiastical income granted by the Pope, selling royal lands and having the crown jewels melted down and sold.
He had much tighter control of his nobles than in 1333, with many of the great nobles of Castile accompanying the expedition. He set up his base in the area of La Línea de la Concepción, north of Gibraltar, with an army of some 20,000 men; the Castilians made no attempt to storm Gibraltar but settled down for a long siege and dug defensive ditches across the isthmus to block Moorish attempts to break out. The camp was more with barracks constructed for the army. Alfonso brought along most of his family by his mistress Leonora de Guzman – four boys and a girl – with his legitimate son Peter remaining in Seville; the siege was supported by primitive cannon in what was to be the first use of gunpowder weapons against Gibraltar's fortifications. The siege dragged on through winter with no sign of the garrison surrendering. In the New Year of 1350, the Black Death –, raging through western Europe for the previous two years – appeared in the camp; the outbreak caused panic. The generals and ladies of the royal household begged Alfonso to call off the siege, but the king refused.
As the Chronica de Alfonso XI puts it, He replied to the Lords and Knights who so advised and counselled him, that he asked them to voice no such advice. Alfonso's determination was soon to cost him his life; the Chronica records that "it was the will of God that the King fell ill
Speaker of the Gibraltar Parliament
The Speaker of the Gibraltar Parliament is the presiding officer of the Gibraltar Parliament, the legislature of the British Overseas Territory of Gibraltar. The current Speaker is Adolfo Canepa, appointed on 18 October 2012, following the resignation of Haresh Budhrani. Below is a list of Speakers of the Gibraltar Parliament:A Legislative Council, the predecessor of the parliament, was inaugurated on November 23, 1950. A Speaker was appointed in 1958
Reconquista
The Reconquista is a name used in English to describe the period in the history of the Iberian Peninsula of about 780 years between the Umayyad conquest of Hispania in 711 and the fall of the Nasrid kingdom of Granada to the expanding Christian kingdoms in 1492. The completed conquest of Granada was the context of the Spanish voyages of discovery and conquest, the Americas—the "New World"—ushered in the era of the Spanish and Portuguese colonial empires. Traditional historiography has marked the beginning of the Reconquista with the Battle of Covadonga, the first known victory in Iberia by Christian military forces since the 711 military invasion of Iberia by combined Arab-Berber forces. In that small battle, a group led by the nobleman Pelagius defeated a Muslim patrol in the mountains of northern Iberia and established the independent Christian Kingdom of Asturias. In the late 10th century, the Umayyad vizier Almanzor waged military campaigns for 30 years to subjugate the northern Christian kingdoms.
His armies composed of Slavic and African Mamluks, ravaged the north sacking the great shrine of Santiago de Compostela. When the government of Córdoba disintegrated in the early 11th century, a series of petty successor states known as taifas emerged; the northern kingdoms struck deep into Al-Andalus. After a Muslim resurgence in the 12th century the great Moorish strongholds in the south fell to Christian forces in the 13th century—Córdoba in 1236 and Seville in 1248—leaving only the Muslim enclave of Granada as a tributary state in the south. After 1491, the entire peninsula was controlled by Christian rulers; the conquest was followed by the Alhambra Decree which expelled Jews who would not convert to Christianity from Castile and Aragon, a series of edicts which forced the conversions of the Muslims in Spain, although a significant part of them was expelled from the Iberian Peninsula. The concept of Reconquista, consolidated in Spanish historiography in the second half of the 19th century, was associated with the development of a Spanish national identity, emphasizing nationalistic and romantic, colonialist, aspects.
Since the 19th century traditional historiography has stressed the existence of the Reconquista, a continuous phenomenon by which the Christian Iberian kingdoms opposed and conquered the Muslim kingdoms, understood as a common enemy who had militarily seized territory from native Iberian Christians. The concept of a Christian reconquest of the peninsula first emerged, in tenuous form, at the end of the 9th century. A landmark was set by the Christian Chronica Prophetica, a document stressing the Christian and Muslim cultural and religious divide in Iberia and the necessity to drive the Muslims out. Both Christian and Muslim rulers fought amongst themselves. Alliances between Muslims and Christians were not uncommon. Blurring distinctions further were the mercenaries from both sides who fought for whoever paid the most; the period is seen today to have had long episodes of relative religious tolerance. The Crusades, which started late in the 11th century, bred the religious ideology of a Christian reconquest, confronted at that time with a staunch Muslim Jihad ideology in Al-Andalus by the Almoravids, to an greater degree by the Almohads.
In fact, previous documents from the 10th and 11th centuries are mute on any idea of "reconquest". Propaganda accounts of Muslim-Christian hostility came into being to support that idea, most notably the Chanson de Roland, a fictitious 11th-century French version of the Battle of Roncevaux Pass dealing with the Iberian Saracens, taught as historical fact in the French educational system since 1880; the modern idea of Reconquista is inextricably linked to the foundational myths of Spanish nationalism in the 19th century, consolidated by the mid-20th century during Franco's National-Catholic dictatorship, based on a strong underlying Castilian ideological element. The idea of a "liberation war" of reconquest against the Muslims, depicted as foreigners, suited well the anti-Republican rebels during the Spanish Civil War who agitated for the banner of a Spanish fatherland threatened by regional nationalisms and communism, their rebellious pursuit was thus a crusade for the restoration of the Church's unity, where Franco stood for both Pelagius of Asturias and El Cid.
The Reconquista has become a rallying call for right and far-right parties in Spain to expel from office incumbent progressive or peripheral nationalist options, as well as their values, in different political contexts as of 2018. Some contemporary authors consider it proved that the process of Christian state-building in Iberia was indeed defined by the reclamation of lands, lost to the Moors in generations past. In this way, state-building might be characterised—at least in ideological, if not practical, terms—as a process by which Iberian states were being'rebuilt'.. In turn, other recent historians dispute the whole concept of Reconquista as a concept created a posteriori in the service of political goals. A few historians point out that Spain and Portugal did not exist as nations, therefore the heirs of the Christian Visigothic Kingdom were not technically reconquering them, as the name suggests. One of the first Spanish intellectuals to question the idea of a "reconquest" that lasted for eight centuries was José Ortega y Gasset, writing in the first half of the 20th century.
However, the term is still in use
Status of Gibraltar
Gibraltar, a British Overseas Territory, located at the southern tip of the Iberian Peninsula, is the subject of an irredentist territorial claim by Spain. It was captured in 1704 during the War of the Spanish Succession; the Spanish Crown formally ceded the territory in perpetuity to the British Crown in 1713, under Article X of the Treaty of Utrecht. Spain attempted to recapture the territory during the thirteenth siege and the Great Siege. British sovereignty over Gibraltar was confirmed in treaties signed in Seville and the Treaty of Paris. Reclamation of the territory became government policy under the regime of the dictator Francisco Franco and has remained in place under successive governments following the Spanish transition to democracy; the Gibraltarians themselves reject any such claim and no political party or pressure group in Gibraltar supports union with Spain. In a referendum in 2002 the people of Gibraltar rejected a joint sovereignty proposal on which Spain and the United Kingdom were said to have reached "broad agreement".
The British Government now refuses to discuss sovereignty without the consent of the Gibraltarians. In 2000, a political declaration of unity was signed by the members of the Gibraltar Parliament. Spain insists on a bilateral agreement with the UK over sovereignty, whereas the UK will only discuss sovereignty if Gibraltar is included in the discussions; the United Nations understanding of the positions of each party is set out in their 2016 report. The UN lists Gibraltar a Non-Self-Governing Territory. Gibraltar was captured in 1704 by a force led by Admiral Sir George Rooke representing the Grand Alliance on behalf of the Archduke Charles, pretender to the Spanish Throne. After the battle all of the inhabitants decided to leave. Spanish attempts to regain the territory in the Twelfth Siege of Gibraltar failed, it was ceded to the Kingdom of Great Britain by Spain in the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht as part of the settlement of the War of the Spanish Succession. In that treaty, Spain ceded to Great Britain "the full and entire propriety of the town and castle of Gibraltar, together with the port and forts thereunto belonging... for without any exception or impediment whatsoever."
Should the British Crown wish to relinquish Gibraltar, a reversion clause holds that the territory would first be offered to Spain, "And in case it shall hereafter seem meet to the Crown of Great Britain to grant, sell or by any means to alienate therefrom the propriety of the said town of Gibraltar, it is hereby agreed and concluded that the preference of having the sale shall always be given to the Crown of Spain before any others." Furthermore, the Treaty stipulates "that the above-named propriety be yielded to Great Britain without any territorial jurisdiction, without any open communication by land with the country round about" and that no overland trade between Gibraltar and Spain is to take place, except for emergency provisions in the case that Gibraltar is unable to be resupplied by sea. The British Government and the Government of Gibraltar today argue that the membership of both Gibraltar and Spain in the European Union — Gibraltar was included as a Special member state territory when the United Kingdom joined the EU in 1973.
The United Nations February 2016 report sets out the differing points of view of the various parties with regard to Gibraltar which the United Nations considers to be a Non-Self-Governing Territory administered by the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Gibraltar was given the Gibraltar Constitution Order 2006 by Britain which established a form of government whereby the Governor of Gibraltar is responsible for the conduct of external affairs, internal security and for certain appointments to public office, the Government of Gibraltar is made responsible for all other matters; the UK believes that as an independent territory, recognised by the United Nations, Gibraltar enjoys the individual and collective rights that are set out in the 2006 constitution and the right of self-determination. Spain disputes the legality of the constitution and claims that it does not change the position of Gibraltar as a colony of the UK with only the UK empowered to discuss Gibraltar matters on the international scene.
The territorial government of Gibraltar, based on law in the 2006 constitution, collects its own taxes and budgets its costs and capital expenditure, with maximum personal tax rates of 28% and company tax of 10%. Spain notes that the European Commission is investigating the tax regime of Gibraltar and that Spain considers Gibraltar a tax haven; the UK believes Gibraltar meets all EU laws regarding the issues of anti-money-laundering, direct taxation and financial supervision. Gibraltar has a robust financial regulation system with anti-tax-evasion agreements including exchange of tax information with 79 countries including all the EU nations, except Spain which has not responded; the UK asked for Gibraltar to be subject to an EU evaluation of its anti-money-laundering controls. Spain recalls that crimes of tobacco smuggling and money-laundering from Gibraltar had been noted in an EU anti fraud report i
Gibraltar portal 
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