Ministry of Justice and Security officials in the Netherlands recommended not to send 31 St. Maarten inmates transferred there after Hurricane Irma back yet, because there is a risk of human rights violations due to conditions at the Pointe Blanche prison. The advice is from January 21, so Justice Minister Cornelius de Weever will probably say it’s outdated, as he recently did with the Progress Committee’s Third Quarter 2018 report on the same topic.
At the time the minister referred to his mid-December inspection of repairs at the penitentiary and said committee members had visited the facility that month as well as in January and confirmed things were moving forward. However, he also admitted challenges such as not being able to finish the electrical work until the renovation is finished, while government depends on external entities selected in a transparent bidding process to execute the various projects.
In Thursday’s opinion pages De Weever again addressed the matter, blaming primarily Dutch Members of Parliament (MPs) Van Raak and Bosman for trying to “perpetuate their skewed view” regarding the detention centre via the press. He called this “unnecessary media coverage” and “useless tabloid articles.”
But the fact remains that the inmates were to be returned by February 1 and this did not take place. Moreover, it’s not likely to happen very soon either if the civil servants concerned in The Hague get their way, despite improvements that may have since been made.
Nevertheless, it does seem almost a bit ironic that the court was asked to get Member of Parliament (MP) Theo Heyliger out of the Philipsburg police cells because of unacceptable circumstances there and move him to Pointe Blanche instead, where the situation is apparently not much better. That’s evidently also why it was decided to take him to the newly-built Judicial Institute Caribbean Netherlands (JICN) in Bonaire instead.
The Prosecutor’s Office said St. Maarten’s prison has reached its current maximum capacity of 70 and the lack-of-space problem will deteriorate even further these coming weeks when Curaçao returns seven local inmates who were sent there. The prosecution’s new detention policy also limits a stay in the Philipsburg cells to 10 days maximum, so that wasn’t an option anyhow.
It is thus abundantly clear that regardless of all the minister’s good intentions, efforts to upgrade the Pointe Blanche prison still have a long way to go. Stating this is not “attempting to mislead” the public but should rather be viewed as a reality check.
