DEN HAAG – The planned visit of the Dutch House of Representatives’ Standing Committee for Kingdom Relations to Saba will not take place for the time being. It was previously announced that the committee intended to pay a working visit to the island in the coming months, but those plans have now been adjusted.
Instead, the committee is expected to visit Bonaire, Curaçao, and Aruba during the upcoming autumn recess. However, in the second week of that recess, a working visit by the Standing Committee on Health, Welfare and Sport is already scheduled. To avoid having two parliamentary committees operating simultaneously in the Caribbean part of the Kingdom, it was decided to cancel the visit to Saba.
The exact content of the program for the so-called ABC islands will be further developed in the coming period. It is expected that a range of Kingdom-related matters will be discussed during those visits.
In the meantime, the Standing Committee for Kingdom Relations has gained a new member. Shanna Schilder has been a member of the Dutch House of Representatives since November 12, 2025, and will now join the committee.
Schilder was born on January 31, 1988, in Volendam and studied law at the University of Amsterdam. In 2021, she moved to Curaçao, where she worked from 2023 to 2025 as head of the Population Register Department at the Ministry of Governance, Planning and Public Services.
In the 2025 parliamentary elections, Schilder was listed third on the candidate list of the PVV. She was sworn in as a Member of Parliament on November 12, 2025. On January 20, 2026, she split from the PVV together with six other MPs due to dissatisfaction with the party’s direction. Since then, she has been part of the Groep Markuszower.
Given her experience in both European and Caribbean parts of the Kingdom, Schilder is expected to make a substantive contribution to discussions within the committee on Kingdom-related issues.