Philipsburg:--Two men from Sri Lanka have been sent back to their country after spending more than 6 months on the floor of the holding cells at the local police station in Philipsburg. The two gentlemen were apprehended by RST officers around the 17 of April of this year. It was discovered that the men had no criminal intentions, instead they had planned to travel to Canada, via France and St.Maarten, to file for asylum. (Young Tamil men are subject to serious scrutiny or worse since the Sinhalese Government of Sri Lanka won the war against the Tamil Tigers. A war that lasted for several decades and left many Sri Lankan dead or mutilated)
Instead of releasing the two men or handing them over to immigration, they were left in the holding cells without any legal reason to hold them. It was only after a month in the cells that they were handed over to immigration. That did not mean they were going anywhere. They remained in the same cells. Several months they remained there in the dark of their cells until by sheer coincidence, a local reporter was arrested and had to spend a couple of days in the same cells.
The reporter met a variety of individuals that seemed to be forgotten by authorities among them Tamils, Indians and even a Canadian and US citizen. All were sleeping, together with criminal suspects, on the floor or dirty mattresses for many months. Again stories of rodents and other creeping animals were heard. No sunlight or fresh air for weeks in a row!
After some months the Canadian was set free, as was the American. However the Tamils stayed, nobody came to their rescue. What’s more few people were even aware they were there. The hardworking civil servants at the immigration department were not happy neither with this enduring and increasingly disturbing situation. But the instruction to set them free or repatriate them never seemed to come.
Ironically, shortly before the arrest of the two men, St.Maarten and other islands in the Dutch Caribbean, (that are part of the so called Political Steering Group for Constitutional Change) made an agreement with the Netherlands to intensify their cooperation in the fight against illegal immigration, human smuggling and human trade. The Dutch or the French (for they came from Paris) were never involved however.
When Attorneys Remco M. Stomp and Denicio Brison were notified about the disturbing situation, they took immediate action and filed an appeal at the local courthouse to try to put an end to the inhumane situation.
The appeal was handled on Friday October 19, 2009 at the local courthouse. The judge had the chance to hear the story first hand from the two men and set the date for his verdict for Monday October 26, 2009. In the verdict the judge instructed the authorities to provide him with additional information with regards to the legal motivation to keep the men locked up for so long and set a date for an additional hearing for Friday October 30, 2009. The authorities apparently did not wanted to wait for the judge’s decision and arranged two tickets on the KLM flight to Sri Lanka (via Amsterdam) on Tuesday October 27, 2009.
(Attorney Remko Stomp)
