Ter Steege: Kingdom cannot leave islands alone with human rights risks

THE HAGUE--Former Attorney General of Aruba and former Chief Public Prosecutor for the BES islands Bote ter Steege used Saturday’s IPKO panel discussion to urge Kingdom partners to take a more serious and practical approach to human rights concerns in the Caribbean part of the Kingdom, warning that detention conditions and the lack of adequate TBS care cannot be left to small islands to solve alone.

Ter Steege delivered his remarks during the IPKO panel discussion on cooperation within IPKO and within the Kingdom. Drawing on six years of experience working in the Caribbean, including on Bonaire, Saba, St. Eustatius and Aruba, he said he wanted to make his contribution as concrete as possible, based on situations he had seen in practice.

He said the discussion about the rule of law should not only focus on constitutional theory, but also on the European Convention on Human Rights, EVRM, which applies to the Kingdom. According to Ter Steege, the Kingdom has signed on to human rights obligations, but the practical realities in the Caribbean countries and territories show that those obligations are not always matched by the necessary facilities, care and cooperation.

The EVRM, known in English as the European Convention on Human Rights, is the human rights treaty that binds the Kingdom to protect basic rights and freedoms, including the humane treatment of persons deprived of their liberty. Ter Steege’s point was that when detention conditions or the treatment of vulnerable offenders fall below acceptable standards, the issue cannot always be treated only as a local criminal justice matter. It can become a Kingdom-level human rights concern.

Ter Steege said he had seen people detained under conditions that raised serious questions about humanity. He stressed that his criticism was not directed at prison directors or prison guards, whom he said often do their utmost every day to care for detainees. His concern, he explained, is with the conditions under which they are required to do that work.

He also focused on persons sentenced under TBS measures. TBS, short for “terbeschikkingstelling,” is a Dutch criminal justice measure for persons who have committed serious crimes and are considered a danger to society because of psychiatric, psychological or behavioral disorders. It combines detention with mandatory treatment, with the goal of reducing the risk that the person will commit new serious offenses after release.

Ter Steege said TBS measures exist in most countries in the Caribbean part of the Kingdom, but adequate care is lacking. According to him, that lack of care creates risks not only for the persons sentenced, but also for society. He noted that the Netherlands itself faces pressure in the area of TBS care, but said the situation in the Caribbean part of the Kingdom is more difficult because the required facilities and specialized treatment are often absent.

As an example, Ter Steege referred to a case in Aruba involving a young man with Dutch and Antillean roots who had killed two children and was sentenced to a long prison term with a TBS measure. Ter Steege said he made significant efforts, while serving as Attorney General, to have the man transferred to the Netherlands for treatment.

He said the man had a social environment in the Netherlands, was born and raised in Limburg, and had lived in the Netherlands for more than half of his life. However, Ter Steege said those efforts did not succeed. According to him, experts in the Netherlands argued that social reintegration could not be organized there, despite the man’s long personal history in the country.

Ter Steege said that, to his knowledge, the man remains in the prison in Aruba, a facility he described as unsuitable for preparing him to safely return to society, whether in the Netherlands or on one of the islands.

He also referred to another case involving a person who had received care in Curaçao, later ended up in the Netherlands and was involved in a fatal incident there. Ter Steege used these examples to underline the need for a Kingdom-wide discussion on how offenders with serious treatment needs are handled when small islands do not have the capacity to provide specialized care.

He called on parliamentarians to keep the EVRM in mind, noting that the Kingdom has already been condemned in a case involving St. Maarten. He said it is not enough to say that criminal law and criminal justice are matters organized by the individual countries if the human rights consequences reach a level that implicates the Kingdom as a whole.

Ter Steege compared the situation to municipalities in the Netherlands, saying no Dutch city of roughly 100,000 people, such as Apeldoorn or Alkmaar, would be expected to independently handle such complex and severe cases.

His message to IPKO was that the Caribbean countries and territories cannot be expected to meet the Kingdom’s human rights obligations without realistic support, specialized care and practical cooperation. He urged representatives to seek serious solutions together, rather than allowing detention and TBS challenges to remain unresolved until they become human rights failures.

Ter Steege’s remarks added a concrete justice and human rights dimension to the wider IPKO discussion on cooperation within the Kingdom. His central point was that cooperation must become practical when the rights, safety and dignity of people are at stake.

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