WILLEMSTAD – The parliaments of Aruba, Curaçao, and Sint Maarten have established a small working group, known as a petit comité, to examine the long-running issue of a dispute settlement mechanism within the Kingdom of the Netherlands.
The decision to create the committee was taken during a tripartite consultation between the three parliaments held on February 23 in Aruba. The group has been tasked with reviewing and addressing questions raised by the Curaçao Parliament regarding the proposed Kingdom Act that would regulate how disputes within the Kingdom are handled.
The committee will consist of parliamentarians from all three countries. Aruba will be represented by Edgard Vrolijk and John Hart. Curaçao’s representatives will be Quincy Girigori and Ramon Yung, while Sint Maarten will be represented by Egbert Doran and Sarah Wescot-Williams.
The working group is scheduled to hold its first meeting on March 19 at 10:00 a.m. in the meeting hall of the Staten van Aruba in Oranjestad.
Following its discussions, the committee will report back to the tripartite parliamentary consultation. Lawmakers are also awaiting advice from the Council of State of the Kingdom of the Netherlands before any concrete proposals are made to amend the draft Kingdom Act.
The creation of a formal dispute settlement mechanism has been debated for years and is widely regarded as one of the most difficult institutional issues within the Kingdom’s constitutional relations.
Since the constitutional reforms of 2010, the Charter for the Kingdom of the Netherlands has required the establishment of a system to resolve legal disputes between the Kingdom government and the Caribbean countries.
Aruba, Curaçao, and Sint Maarten have long argued that the mechanism should be handled by an independent body capable of issuing binding rulings. Earlier proposals from the Netherlands were criticized by the Caribbean countries for lacking sufficient independence.
A previous Kingdom Act addressing the dispute regulation collapsed in 2021 in the Senate of the Netherlands after strong opposition from the Caribbean parliaments. The new process aims to finally produce a settlement mechanism that meets the requirements set out in the Kingdom Charter.