Nicolaï guest speaker during
Daily Herald Annual Lecture
PHILIPSBURG--The Daily Herald in conjunction with University of St. Martin (USM) will host the sixth annual Daily Herald Lecture on Tuesday, October 2. Guest speaker will be former Dutch minister of Kingdom Relations and Administrative Reform and current Member of Parliament of the Netherlands Atzo Nicolaï.
Nicolaï will address the topic “Press Freedom” in relation to responsibility. The title of his lecture is “Media: Noblesse Oblige.”
Nicolaï (47) was The Daily Herald’s 2006 Person of the Year and therefore management of the newspaper thought it would be a good idea to invite him to give a lecture. This lecture will take place at Belair Community Centre next week Tuesday and will start at 8:00pm. Prior to the lecture, Nicolaï will have a meeting with members of the local media and USM students.
Though he is now in the opposition as a Member of Parliament for the VVD, Nicolaï played a vital role in the constitutional process. As the head of the Dutch delegation in the constitutional restructuring talks with the Netherlands Antilles, he was instrumental in realising the Final Declaration (Slotakkoord) in The Hague on November 2, 2006, as well as the signing of the Transition Accord for St. Maarten on February 12.
Those agreements paved the way for St. Maarten to become a country in the Kingdom of the Netherlands in December 2008. Under his responsibility, an agreement was also signed with the “smaller” Antillean islands Bonaire, Saba and St. Eustatius.
In the Second Chamber, Nicolaï is a member of various committees, including Economic Affairs; Education, Culture and Science; Social and Labour Affairs; Traffic and Water Affairs; Finance; and European Affairs.
Nicolaï was appointed State Secretary of European Affairs in 2002 in the first cabinet of Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende, a position he held until 2006. In that year he became Minister of Kingdom Relations and Administrative Affairs in the third Balkenende cabinet, which lasted until early 2007. After the last elections for the Second Chamber, Nicolaï returned to the Chamber. He was also a Member of Parliament between 1998 and 2002.
Nicolaï holds a Master’s degree in Constitutional and Administrative Law from Amsterdam Free University and a Master’s degree in Political Science from the same university. He held management positions at both the Council of Culture and the Council of Arts in the past.
