A lot was said during Monday’s Parliament meeting on repercussions of the verdict by the European Court of Human Rights in the Corallo case, much of it not worth going into. However, NA-faction member Christophe Emanuel made a good point that had been voiced earlier on several occasions in this column.
With current local detention facilities obvious below par, why is The Hague so dead set against using means from the Recovery and Resilience Fund at the World Bank to develop a proper penitentiary system here?
Dutch State Secretary of Home Affairs and Kingdom Relations Raymond Knops said soon after 550 million euros were made available by his government for St. Maarten’s recovery from catastrophic Hurricane Irma that he did not think having the Netherlands build a new prison on the island in response to the natural disaster would send a right message. In addition, it’s an autonomous matter of country St. Maarten.
As pointed out before, although this is a somewhat understandable position to take, it regarded such an urgent situation that inmates had to be housed temporarily in other countries within the kingdom. Correctional officers from the Netherlands provided badly needed personnel assistance but have since left, while the prisoners sent elsewhere are coming back.
Some Dutch money has been provided for basic repairs and Justice Minister Cornelius de Weever mentioned talks with Independent Consulting Engineers (ICE) on a plan to tackle the most pressing deficiencies. A “bits and pieces” approach was to be used with individual projects that don’t surpass NAf. 50,000 so no time-consuming public bidding process is required.
But, let’s face it, these are basically band-aid fixes that don’t provide a long-term structural answer for the future. The Law Enforcement Council recently again referred to the kingdom’s responsibility to safeguard human rights also of persons in jail.
Coincidentally, a brand-new prison was just opened in Bonaire. Of course, the so-called BES islands (Bonaire, St. Eustatius and Saba) are now part of the Netherlands, so that their national affairs are directly managed by the Dutch government.
Nevertheless, with all that still-unused capital in the Trust Fund it should be possible to at least significantly improve conditions at the Pointe Blanche penitentiary as well. Rather than blame each other, politicians and public administrators in both Philipsburg and The Hague would do well to seek reasonable and sustainable joint solutions.
