‘Six weeks for indocumented persons to apply for a ‘Brooks Tower (BT)’ temporary residence permit’
Undocumented persons who were living in Curaçao, Bonaire and St. Maarten before December 31, 2001 or established themselves between January 1, 2002 and December 31, 2005 will be given six weeks’ time to register and apply for a (BT) temporary residence permit that will be valid for a year.
They will be granted this permit only if they or their employer meet(s) all established requirements. During the one-year period of validity of the permit the foreigner should prepare to enter the regular process at the end of the year 2010. This is what Minister of Justice Mrs Magaly Jacoba declared during a press conference on Wednesday.
According to the Minister, this project, which will start with the presentation of documents on all the islands of the Antilles on Tuesday, Novembver 3, will be the implementation of the Brooks Tower Accord. This is an agreement signed by all the Lieutenant Governors with the Minister of Justice in 2007 for the purpose of dealing with the issue and impact of undocumented persons on the islands.
It is not a period of grace
The Minister of Justice declared emphatically that this is not a period of grace. "During the grace period of the year 2001 the requirements were rather light, and nearly all the undocumented persons who went through the whole process, succeeded in qualifying for a temporary permit. In this case requirements will be stricter."
The object of this project is to get the undocumented persons out of illegality, enabling the government to get a better insight into the number of people living in the island and making use of its infrastructure. Persons who stay in an island without having the required permits, impose a burden on the infrastructure of the island without the government being in a position to anticipate this, as the government bases its policy on official figures.
Procedure
The Minister of Justice indicated that this project will run alongside the common process. This project is only directed to the persons mentioned before and the project will follow its own procedure. The undocumented person will have to report at a specific place, taking with him all documents required by the government, and the whole process of application until the moment of the permit being granted will be handled in the same place. For Curacao it will be Sentro Deportivo Kòrsou (SDK) at Brievengat, for Bonaire it will be the counter of Burgerzaken at Playa, and for St. Maarten it will be at the Office of the Immigration Service/ Nieuwe Toelatingsorganisatie on Illidge Road.
The arrangement will not be open to all undocumented persons
This opportunity is offered to two categories of undocumented persons: the first category settled in one of the islands before December 31, 2001 and the second category established itself during the period from January 1, 2002 through December 31, 2005. Consequently, this opportunity will not be open to undocumented persons who arrived after December 31, 2005. All those who entered the islands on or after January 1, 2006 and who stay in the islands illegally, have two options, the person involved either repatriates definitively or comes into the open and makes a regular application for a permit, awaiting the result abroad.
Control
The Minister of Justice also declared that after the implementation of this project much stricter control will be applied and any person who fails to make use of this opportunity will bear the consequence of having to return to his country. No persons can be considered who have failed to do the right thing.
Public information campaign
The Minister of Justice considers information to the community in general and to the undocumented persons in particular and their employers to be of key importance. Therefore, consultations were held in advance with all entities to be involved in the process. Now that the process is about to begin, a comprehensive information campaign will be started, making use of various means of communication. Mrs Jacoba: "There will be announcements in newspapers, on the radio and television, brochures, posters and booklets will be published explaining all the requirements to be met by undocumented persons, and, of course, there will be a website with all the necessary information. All this will be done in the English, Spanish, Papiamentu, Creole and Dutch languages. The central theme throughout the campaign will be "Let’s do it right", because that is exactly what the government wants to accomplish: for undocumented persons mentioned in categories one and two, i.e. those who were living in one of the islands before December 31, 2001 and those who established themselves during the period from January 1, 2002 through December 31, 2005, to stop living and working in illegal circumstances and simply do what is right."