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French, Dutch sides meet today on developments
by The Daily Herald
Posted: Oct 27, 2005 14:31 UTC
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PHILIPSBURG - French and Dutch side authorities will be meeting today, Thursday, to “look at recent developments that are playing in French St. Martin where certain situations and policies are concerned,” as Commissioner Sarah Wescott-Williams put it.
The Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) that St. Maarten’s Government and the Commune of St. Martin were in the “process of establishing” in 2003, setting the “broad areas of cooperation” and the need for periodic consultation, will be discussed.
St. Maarten had decided on that draft in 2003, but the French authorities needed to send the document to Paris for approval. “Now we have understood that the document is in its final stage of approval on the French side. This week the Municipal Council will be discussing it and hopefully we will be able to affix our signatures to the MOU shortly,” Wescott-Williams stated at Wednesday’s press briefing.
She said some of the rules and regulations applied on the French side “come from as high up as the Republic.” “In my opinion there is an accelerated application of many laws and policies that many persons in Dutch St. Maarten were unaware of,” she stated. She said “some things appear new, other things have been there, not really put into effect.”
According to Wescott-Williams, an inventory is needed of “what exactly is happening today” and on what basis things are taking place. “Once you have that total picture, authorities of the two sides can come to an understanding how to address them at the level where the policies and regulations are being made,” she said.
She said “special consideration” to “this unique situation that we often boast about in terms of one island, no borders, two administrations” would be requested for specific items. “It might be French law, it might be Dutch law, but applied to St. Maarten/St. Martin, it brings along problems for the population,” she said.
The objective of today’s meeting with the French delegation, which will be headed by Mayor Albert Fleming, will be to get a “total overview” of “what the covered issues are that are playing.” “Have they been there all the time and not applied? So what were the reasons for them not being applied or not applied as strictly as they are today, and where does the responsibility lie?”
Wescott-Williams said there was “no buffer,” as it concerned European/French laws that were being applied. To request consideration for the unique situation, local authorities “need to have it clearly in focus to have the arguments what it is doing to the population.”
“I am sure that those applying the law are going by the book, by the law, but what is it doing for the people, and the way that we have been accustomed of living together and not having these things come over us when we traverse from one to the other side,” she said.
She said “many questions” needed answers; for example, the labour situation whereby people live on one side of the island and work on the other side. She stressed, however, that government needed to have “facts.”
She said the Treaty of Concordia signed in 1648 was an “historic fact” and still had its value. “We’re 357 years further. It still has a lot of value and worth, but in my opinion not enough to deal with the situation of today. We need a new cooperation tailored to today’s needs of both sides,” she stated.
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