Mexican standoff with pro bono lawyers
PHILIPSBURG – The strike of the pro bono lawyers enters its fourth week on Saturday and there is still no solution in sight. Geert Hatzmann, the Dean of the Bar Association, does not exclusively rely on handling criminal cases for his income anymore; like his colleagues of the seven law offices that support the strike, he has made commercial criminal cases and civil cases like labor disputes part of his daily activities.
Apart from Hatzmann, the law offices of Marlon Hart, Zylena Bary, Sulvaran & Peterson and Duncan & Brandon have withdrawn their attorneys from on-call services and from defending clients who depend on government-appointed legal services.
The attorneys have not been paid for pro bono services since January. Hatzmann says that the government owes him between $32,000 and $33,000 and that the situation for some of his colleagues is similar. In 2016, the attorneys reached an agreement with then Minister of Justice Edson Kirindongo about their tariffs that had not been adjusted since 1993.
Since August of that year, the tariff for handling a pro bono case doubled from 900 to 1,800 guilders and attorneys could invoice 200 instead of 75 guilders for actions like attending interrogations of their clients at the police station and for attending hearings at the Judge of Instruction. Pro bono attorneys invoiced – and got paid – since August 2016 based on these new tariffs.
But in April of this year, the Justice Department got in the way. “You know how this started?” Hatzmann says. “Vidjai Jusia, the head of the justice affairs department approached me in the streets. We have to talk about your invoices, he said. a few weeks later I got a phone call and I asked what this was all about. Our controller has noticed something, was the answer.”
In the meantime, Hatzmann’s fellow-attorneys Shaira Bommel and Marlon Hart had also been approached by the justice department. “Jusia told us that our invoices had been frozen because the tariffs we used were not regulated by law.”
That those tariffs had been used since 2016 did not seem to matter. Hatzmann: “They said that Kirindongo’s measure to agree with the new tariffs was a political decision. We said that we understand that the government is in financial trouble after Hurricane Irma. We proposed to have 75 percent of the invoices paid and to make up the difference later in the year.”
Since then, there has been no more communication between the striking pro bono attorneys and the justice department. Hatzmann says that the principle of trust has been violated by the government.
The attorneys do not intend to end their strike until their invoices are paid and until they are allowed to use the new tariffs they agreed upon with former Minister Kirindongo in 2016.
Photo caption: Dean of the Bar Association, Geert Hatzmann. Photo Hilbert Haar.
