PHILIPSBURG:--- A long-running dispute over the salaries of members of the Public Prosecutor’s Office has reached the Court of First Instance, placing renewed attention on a Kingdom regulation that requires prosecutors’ salaries to be adjusted annually based on public-sector wage developments in Curaçao, Sint Maarten and the Caribbean Netherlands.
The court schedule lists Vijdin Awadhpersad, Kirsty van der Willigen, Royanna Baly and Robbert-Jan Boswijk as parties in case GAZ00018/2026 against the Minister of Justice of Sint Maarten. Attorney D.I. Schram is listed as representing the Minister of Justice.
The case has been scheduled for a hearing, but the court calendar does not disclose the precise amount being claimed, the years covered by the dispute, or the specific relief being sought. No ruling has been issued.
The case nevertheless exposes a complex salary system that has been in place since the constitutional restructuring of the former Netherlands Antilles on October 10, 2010.
Mandatory Annual Adjustment
The dispute is rooted in Article 10, paragraph 4, of the Rijksbesluit rechtspositie leden openbare ministeries van Curaçao, van Sint Maarten en van Bonaire, Sint Eustatius en Saba.
That Kingdom decree regulates the legal position and remuneration of members of the Public Prosecutor’s Offices in Curaçao, Sint Maarten and Bonaire, St. Eustatius and Saba.
Article 10(4) states that the responsible Kingdom ministers must annually adjust prosecutors’ salaries based on the average development of civil-servant salaries in the three participating countries during the preceding calendar year.
For this calculation, the three components are:
- Curaçao;
- Sint Maarten; and
- the Netherlands, as it relates to Bonaire, St. Eustatius and Saba.
The Justice Ministers of Curaçao, Sint Maarten and the Netherlands are required to act jointly in applying the adjustment.
The provision is written as a mandatory annual mechanism. It is not described as an optional allowance that Sint Maarten may grant only when sufficient money is available, nor is it dependent solely on salary increases awarded to Sint Maarten civil servants.
If civil-servant salaries remain frozen in Sint Maarten while salaries increase in Curaçao and the Caribbean Netherlands, the zero percent recorded for Sint Maarten must still be placed into the calculation with the increases granted in the other two jurisdictions.
For example, if Curaçao civil servants receive three percent, Sint Maarten grants zero percent, and the Caribbean Netherlands grants two percent, the resulting adjustment for members of the Public Prosecutor’s Office would be approximately 1.67 to 2 percent.
A salary freeze in one country therefore lowers the final average but does not automatically eliminate the adjustment generated by increases in the other two jurisdictions.
Sint Maarten cannot decide alone
The legal structure means Sint Maarten does not have complete freedom to determine the salaries of its prosecutors exclusively through its domestic salary policy.
The Public Prosecutor’s Office created after 10-10-10 is a hybrid structure. Curaçao, Sint Maarten and the Caribbean Netherlands have separate Public Prosecutor’s Offices, but they operate under a joint Procurator General and a Kingdom framework governing their organization, cooperation and the legal position of prosecutors.
The annual average was intended to prevent prosecutors’ salaries from becoming dependent on the wage policy of only one country. It also sought to maintain some consistency within a prosecution service whose members may be deployed across the participating jurisdictions.
However, the system creates a direct financial obligation for Sint Maarten whenever qualifying public-sector salary increases are granted elsewhere—even when the country has frozen the salaries of its own civil servants because of financial difficulties.
The arrangement can therefore result in prosecutors becoming legally entitled to salary adjustments while teachers, police officers, immigration personnel, prison officers and other Sint Maarten civil servants receive no comparable increase.
That unequal outcome may be politically difficult to defend, but the legal question before the court will be whether the Government complied with the binding Kingdom regulation—not whether the salary system is popular or financially convenient.
Different from Cost-of-Living allowance
The annual salary adjustment under Article 10(4) must not be confused with the location-based allowance provided for under Article 12 of the same Kingdom decree.
Article 10(4) governs how prosecutors’ basic salaries develop over time. Article 12 allows for a separate allowance intended to address differences in purchasing power or living costs between Curaçao, Sint Maarten and the Caribbean Netherlands.
The distinction is important because any existing Sint Maarten location allowance does not necessarily replace the annual salary adjustment required under Article 10(4). They are two separate components with different legal purposes.
Dispute predates Tackling
Although Minister of Justice Nathalie Tackling is now the named government authority responsible for responding to the case, the salary structure and any accumulated failure to apply it did not originate under her tenure.
The system has existed since 2010, while the reported disagreement concerns salary developments accumulated over several years. The matter must therefore be viewed as an inherited institutional and financial dispute rather than a salary policy personally created by the current Justice Minister.
The case could nevertheless have significant consequences for the country’s finances. If the court determines that mandatory adjustments were not applied, Government could potentially face claims for retroactive salary payments, allowances and other employment-related consequences.
The full financial exposure cannot be determined from the court calendar because the amounts, calculation periods and individual claims have not been publicly disclosed.
The proceedings also raise broader questions about Government’s financial administration. It remains unclear whether the required annual calculations were performed, whether the necessary decisions were taken jointly by the three Justice Ministers and whether the corresponding financial obligations were included in Sint Maarten’s national budgets.
Until the court issues its decision, the listing establishes only that the salary dispute has reached the judicial stage. It does not establish that the claimants have won their case or that the Government has been ordered to make any payment.
What is already evident, however, is that a complicated Kingdom salary arrangement left unresolved for years has now become a Sint Maarten court case—with taxpayers potentially responsible for the final bill.
