Dispute regulation on IPKO agenda – again
PHILIPSBURG – Three faction leaders – Silveria Jacobs (National Alliance), Rolando Brison (United St. Maarten party) and Wycliffe Smith (St. Maarten Christian Party) will travel on Wednesday to the Netherlands to attend the meetings of the Inter-Parliamentary Kingdom Consultation (IPKO) in The Hague. The president of Parliament and leader of the delegation MP Sarah Wescot-Williams will join her colleagues on Monday to enable her to attend the funeral of Democratic Party stalwart Roy Marlin. United Democrats faction leader Theo Heyliger is unable to attend the IPKO–meetings.
The IPKO begins next week Tuesday and continues until next Friday, but on Monday the delegations of St. Maarten, Aruba and Curacao will hold a pre-IPKO pow-wow.
One of the points on the agenda is –again – the dispute regulation. A couple of years ago the IPKO-delegations – the parliaments of the three Caribbean islands and the Netherlands – reached a historic agreement about this regulation, but the Dutch government threw a spanner in the works. Former Minister Ronald Plasterk ignored the IPKO-decision and submitted his own draft dispute regulation.
MP Wescot-Williams said on Tuesday afternoon that the status of the Plasterk-draft is unclear. It has been sent to the Council of State for advice but so far nobody has seen this advice, she said.
“We are going to discuss this at the IPKO,” Wescot-Williams said. “The three Caribbean countries still want to put forward their own draft kingdom law via their governments and their ministers plenipotentiary. In the meantime we are quite curious about the advice from the Council of State on the Plasterk-draft.”
When the IPKO reached its dispute regulation agreement a couple of years ago, Dutch delegation leader MP Jeroen Recourt spoke the historic words: “If parliaments speak, governments have to listen.” It sounded good, but of course the Dutch government did not listen at all.
“That is the thing,” Wescot-Williams said. “They went ahead, much to the frustration of all parliaments and especially the three Caribbean parliaments. We wanted a binding advice from an independent institution. Notwithstanding that, the kingdom government and former Minister Plasterk drafted their own law without taking the decisions of the IPKO into consideration.”
The IPKO-delegations will pay a visit to a yet to be identified waste-disposal facility and to Wageningen University.
