WILLEMSTAD – Efforts to improve the exchange of police and judicial information between Curaçao, Aruba, Sint Maarten and the Netherlands are running into a fundamental obstacle: the four countries do not provide identical levels of legal protection for personal data.
The issue has become increasingly urgent as the four governments seek closer cooperation against cross-border and organized crime while parliamentarians are demanding guarantees that differences in privacy legislation will not disrupt the exchange of essential information.
During the IPKO meeting in Aruba in February, parliamentary delegations agreed that each country should examine whether its legislation provides sufficient protection to allow personal information to be exchanged safely, including information used in security cooperation.
The resulting inventory was discussed in June and showed that all four countries have privacy legislation, but their legal frameworks differ considerably.
The problem is especially significant for Curaçao, Aruba and Sint Maarten because personal information transferred from the European Netherlands is subject to strict safeguards.
Dutch privacy authorities have previously questioned whether the Caribbean countries currently provide a sufficiently equivalent level of protection, with effective independent supervision identified as one of the concerns.
The issue also surfaced during the Judicial Four-Country Consultation held in Curaçao in early September.
The justice ministers agreed on the importance of improving the exchange of police and judicial information, but disagreement remains over how this should be achieved legally.
The Netherlands sees a consensus Kingdom Act as a possible way to create a common legal framework. The Caribbean countries, however, have raised objections to that approach.
Curaçao already withdrew from discussions on harmonizing privacy legislation within the Judicial Four-Country Consultation in 2024. The Curaçao government argued that privacy protection was not exclusively a Justice portfolio and therefore should not be handled solely through that forum.
The underlying problem has nevertheless remained unresolved.
Without compatible legal safeguards, information concerning criminal investigations, suspects, convicted persons and other sensitive matters cannot necessarily move freely between authorities simply because the countries are part of the same Kingdom.
That creates a potentially significant complication for security cooperation. Police and judicial authorities increasingly work across borders, while organized crime, money laundering, drug trafficking and other criminal activities rarely respect the constitutional boundaries between the countries.
Parliamentarians from all four countries are now pressing the Dutch government for a timetable. They want to know whether planned legislation will be ready before existing differences begin to restrict data exchanges and what measures will be taken to prevent information important to residents or law enforcement from becoming temporarily inaccessible.
The debate therefore goes beyond privacy legislation itself. It raises a broader practical question for the Kingdom: how can four autonomous countries with different legal systems exchange increasingly sensitive information while maintaining adequate and comparable protection for the people whose data are being shared?