Parliament wants to relieve PM Marlin of his duties

PHILIPSBURG – With an 8 to 1 vote the Parliament passed a motion on Friday that resolves to discharge Prime Minister and Minister of General Affairs William Marlin of his duties with immediate effect and to install Vice-Prime Minister Rafael Boasman as the Prime Minister. The motion also resolved to call on Governor drs Eugène Holiday to formalize and effectuate this decision of Parliament with immediate effect.

The Parliament met in a Central Committee setting on Friday morning to continue with a meeting that was adjourned on Thursday afternoon when Prime Minister Marlin took his leave for an urgent meeting with the Governor.

Initially the adjournment was for half an hour, but after an hour Marlin informed Parliament’s president MP Sarah Wescot-Williams that he was unable to return until “late in the evening.”

The meeting was then adjourned until Friday morning. Marlin sent out a press release on Thursday night indicating that he would be in an urgent meeting of the Council of Ministers on Friday morning and that he therefore would be unable to come to Parliament.

“Ministers do not have to be here, but they are free to join.” Wescot-Williams said at the beginning of the meeting on Friday morning. And thus the meeting continued without the Prime Minister. In a session that took close to 3.5 hours, Parliament passed three motions, of which the last one aims to relieve the Prime Minister of his duties.

The motion was supported by the UP-faction, the DP-faction and USp-MP Chanel Brownbill. NA-MP Ardwell Irion voted against, saying that he still believes in working together. The other members of the National alliance and United St. Maarten party faction were not present in the meeting.

A second motion passed unanimous; it instructs the Council of Ministers and the Minister of General Affairs in particular “to order and instruct the Minister Plenipotentiary to ask the chairman of the Kingdom Council of Ministers to add the annulment of the dissolution decree to its agenda. If the Kingdom Council of Ministers puts it on the agenda, the Parliament demands that the Minister Plenipotentiary proposes the suspension and annulment of the decree of November 3 that dissolved the Parliament and called for elections on January 8.

A third motion also was approved unanimously. This is a motion of disapproval that simply states that the Parliament disapproves of the government’s decision “to dissolve the Parliament and to hold premature elections.”