Shoddy mess
Did we have it coming? The decision by the Kingdom Council of Ministers to force the Integrity Chamber upon St. Maarten cannot come as a surprise to anybody. Let’s not talk about fair, because that is a kids’ argument. Let’s talk about how we got there and what we could have done to prevent this shoddy mess.
In September 2013, the kingdom government gave an instruction to Governor Holiday to investigate the proper and honest functioning of the public administration in St. Maarten. We won’t go into the uproar that followed, but stick to the results.
The governor commissioned PriceWaterhouseCoopers with an integrity investigation; the government ordered its own integrity investigation; this was done by an independent committee under Chairman Justice Bob Wit, the president of the Constitutional Court. The cream on the cake was the government’s decision to order corruption watchdog Transparency International to perform a so-called National Integrity System Assessment.
In May 2014, the General Audit Chamber published its baseline study institutional integrity management. Its results were devastating: most regulations to manage integrity were lacking, the chamber’s report states.
When the Wit-committee published its report with forty recommendations, the government – at the time led by Sarah Wescot-Williams – embraced the conclusions “for 99.9 percent.”
PriceWaterhouseCoopers recommended in its report that appeared later that year an integrity assessment of Parliament. It never happened.
In the spring of 2015, Parliament struggled with a proposal of the Marcel Gumbs government to establish an Integrity Chamber. The idea to set up such an institution is one of the recommendations from the Wit-report.
Coalition-partner UP made the most noise about it, culminating in the iconic statement by faction leader Franklin Meyers that he preferred to die on his feet to living on his knees.
But in the end, the Parliament gave in to the pressure and approved the legislation in August 2015. Current Prime Minister William Marlin and his National Alliance faction voted against.
In September, the ombudsman sent the legislation for review to the Constitutional Court. In July of last year, this court struck down the law.
From there on, the Integrity Chamber suddenly became persona non grata in St. Maarten – at least on the government level. The legislation was at the department of legal affairs for review, was the official position. But in reality, nothing happened with it.
In January, when the controversy erupted about the appointment of the Dutch quartermaster Hans Leijtens – one-and-a-half year after the deadline for said appointment – PM Marlin said that the country does not need an Integrity Chamber and that there are enough mechanisms in place to deal with integrity issues.
Marlin suggested instead expanding the authority of the General Audit Chamber to deal with integrity issues; in itself not a bad idea given the solid reputation of this institution.
But the thing that has not come to haunt St. Maarten is that, after these lofty statements, nothing happened, at least anything that the public, let alone the kingdom government, has been made aware of.
And thus Minister Ronald Plasterk, in the twilight of his political career, saw fit to bring down the hammer with a general measure of kingdom administration.
How this is going to work out is anybody’s guess. The government intends to appeal the decision, but appeals against such measures stand little chance of success. Why? Because the so-called reinforced crown appeal (versterkt kroonberoep) the government intends to use is a nonentity, constitutional experts like Douwe Jan Elzinga say.
