THE HAGUE – The effects of the 40 million euros that the Netherlands contributes annually to law enforcement in Curacao, Aruba and Sint Maarten are not measurable.

That is the answer of Undersecretary for Kingdom Relations Raymond Knops in response to the question asked by Member of the Second Chamber of the Dutch parliament Andre Bosman whether it is possible to “perform a baseline measurement, or to set up indicators that make it possible to assess which effects the Dutch contribution has on the law enforcement chain in the Caribbean countries.

Grant

The undersecretary said he had spoken “in detail” with many chain partners, departments and experts. “The parties share the wish to gain more insight into the effectiveness of the Dutch contribution, but at the same time emphasize that it is not possible to measure precisely what effects can be attributed to the Dutch input to the Caribbean law enforcement chain.

This is particularly difficult because the Netherlands is not the only party that uses funds to strengthen the law enforcement chain. The law enforcement chain is a country matter and parts of it, such as customs, the prison system, the probation service and the local police forces, are funded from the countries’ independent budgets.

Impossible

Although the establishment of indicators for measuring the effectiveness of Dutch contribution across the entire law enforcement chain of individual countries is considered practically impossible, the protocol amended in January 2019 allows criminal investigation cooperation between the countries in the Kingdom to provide specific annual information.

From 2020, the Minister of Justice and Security and I have an annual consultation with the Ministries of Justice of the countries on a programmatic overview of the results to be achieved by the criminal investigation team, partly on the basis of an analysis of the regional crime picture of the countries. I therefore intend to inform you about this annually with my colleague from Justice and Security. In addition, I will further inform you about the results delivered from the corruption approach of the Corruption Investigation Team (TBO) since 2016,” says Knops.