On Thursday, a member of the National Assembly of Suriname from the National Democratic Party (NDP), Ebu Jones, staged a protest walkout from a closed-door meeting of the Assembly’s Committee of the Whole, escalating a long-running debate over transparency in the handling of a high-profile missing hazardous material case.
The case at the center of the dispute is the disappearance of more than 300 kilograms of mercury from a local police station. Jones has long pushed for open, public debate on the incident, and told reporters from outlet Starnieuws after his exit that the confidential information shared during the closed session only reinforced his original position that the affair does not warrant behind-closed-doors discussion.
Jones argued that none of the details presented during the meeting would threaten national security or any other critical public interest if released to the public. In comments to reporters, he noted that he had opposed holding the discussion in the closed Committee of the Whole format from the very start of the process. “The disappearance of mercury from a police station and all surrounding issues do not belong behind closed doors,” Jones told Starnieuws. “Society itself needs full openness to rebuild trust in the police and the entire justice system.”
He added that a string of recent incidents involving police officers has already eroded public confidence in Suriname’s law enforcement institutions, and that transparency in this high-stakes case is the only path to repairing that damaged trust. Bound by confidentiality rules that apply to all Committee of the Whole proceedings, Jones cannot share specific details of what was discussed during the closed session. He did, however, emphasize that the information shared does not meet the threshold required to justify a secret meeting.
“In my judgment, the information we received is not so sensitive that it has to be handled behind closed doors,” Jones explained. “There is no information whose disclosure would put national security at risk. In fact, most of this information is already considered an open public secret.” That assessment led Jones to inform the Speaker of the National Assembly that he saw no reason to continue participating in the meeting, and he left shortly after.
Jones pointed out that multiple parliamentary factions had previously stated publicly that they would demand an open session if the information under discussion was not sufficiently sensitive to justify secrecy. But according to Jones, that stated commitment to transparency was not acted on during the closed meeting.
Beyond the mercury case, the Committee of the Whole had three other items on its agenda: the disappearance of four kilograms of gold from state-owned gold producer Grassalco, the performance of Suriname’s Anti-Corruption Unit, and a massive fish die-off in the Saramacca River. Jones told reporters he fears these remaining issues will also be pushed to closed-door discussion, following the same precedent set in the mercury case. “Based on what I experienced, I expect the same approach will be followed for the other agenda items,” he said.
The closed-door meeting was ultimately adjourned before all business could be completed, which resulted in the cancellation of all subsequent planned public sessions of the National Assembly. Jones stressed that his criticism is limited exclusively to the decision to handle the mercury case in a closed Committee of the Whole session, and he has made no comments on the substance of the information shared during the meeting. “I am bound by the confidentiality requirement and will abide by it,” Jones said. “My objection is only to the fact that, in my view, this information could have been discussed openly without issue.”