THE HAGUE – The House of Representatives Committee on Kingdom Relations continues to struggle with its status compared to other committees. The question of whether files should be left to the so-called specialist committees was also raised again in a procedure meeting this week.
The dilemma, as committee chairman Mariëlle Paul called it, was already present more than 10 years ago. After Bonaire, St. Eustatius and Saba were incorporated into the country of the Netherlands in 2010, the House decided that the interests of the BES islands would henceforth be dealt with by the specialist committees. At the suggestion of then committee member Ronald van Raak (SP), this was quickly reversed, because the specialist committees may have substantive knowledge in their field, but most members had no idea of the situation in the Caribbean Netherlands.
More or less tacitly, the current Kingdom Relations Committee has abandoned that track. “We must not take the place of other committees and stick to our coordinating and driving role without taking over from the others,” said Paul. In practice, this means that BES matters are increasingly 'snowed under' because knowledge of the islands is certainly not abundantly present in the specialist committees and more urgency is assigned to European Dutch issues.
Observers also wonder how effective the fragmentation over 12 specialist committees is because many challenges on the islands are interrelated: the poverty policy cannot be viewed separately from, for example, economic development and domestic violence.