Oral presentation: Hannah Meijer

In 1980, James Murray was sentenced to life imprisonment, after which he was imprisoned in Curaçao until 1999 and afterwards in Aruba. In the 2016 "Murray case", the ECHR ruled that the lack of psychiatric care provided to him for over 30 years constituted a grave violation of Article 3 of the ECHR by the Dutch State. Murray himself had by that time already died.

The lack of adequate psychiatric care for prisoners still remains a problem: forensic psychiatric treatment still cannot be provided in a Caribbean clinic within the Kingdom. Given the small size of the islands and the infrequency of such sentences, it is also financially and organizationally unrealistic for a separate Caribbean country to organize this. The only way such care can be provided within the Kingdom on the Caribbean islands themselves is through collaboration. This study therefore focuses on how to legally structure a collaboration in which a Caribbean psychiatric care unit/clinic can be established with the aim of fulfilling the autonomous national obligations under Article 3 of the ECHR. At first glance, creating an independent public agency seems logic, but questions arise about parliamentary accountability. A legal framework for such a body (on the Kingdom level) does not exist. The ultimate appropriate form of collaboration has to be in line with requirements on democratic oversight and participation by the various countries in such a collaborative arrangement.