Collectivity of Saint Martin
Saint Maarten: Past, Present and Future
This short video was made as a lead in to the showing of An Inconvenient Truth at a local movie theater in St. Maaarten. The intention was to make the issue of Global Warming more personal to the viewers. Not one politician has ever mentioned the issue of GW nor has our press ever asked them about it. Sadly, in reducing the size of the video to post onto YouTube the music is now slightly off to the photos, which also lost some quality. We will be looking for another way to post this video in it’s full glory on another site in the future.
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Saint Martin (French: Saint-Martin), officially the Collectivity of Saint Martin (French: Collectivité de Saint-Martin) is an overseas collectivity of France located in the Caribbean. It came into being on 15 July 2007, encompassing the northern parts of Saint Martin island and neighbouring islets, the largest of which is Île Tintamarre. The southern part of the island, Sint Maarten, is one of the four constituent countries that form the Kingdom of the Netherlands. Its capital is Marigot. Its population is 37,000 on 54 km2. It is separated from the British Overseas Territory of Anguilla by the Anguilla Channel.
Politics and Government
Location of the Collectivity of St Martin in the Leeward Islands.
Saint Martin was for many years a French commune forming part of Guadeloupe, which is an overseas région and département of France and is therefore in theEuropean Union. In 2003 the population of the French part of the island voted in favour of secession from Guadeloupe in order to form a separate overseas collectivity (COM) of France. On 9 February 2007, the French Parliament passed a bill granting COM status to both the French part of Saint Martin and (separately) the neighbouringSaint Barthélemy. The new status took effect once the local assembly was elected on 15 February 2007. Saint Martin remains part of the European Union.
The new governance structure befitting an overseas collectivity took effect on 15 July 2007 with the first session of the Territorial Council (French: Conseil territorial) and the election of Louis-Constant Fleming as president of the Territorial Council. On 25 July 2008 Fleming resigned after being sanctioned by the Conseil d’État for one year over problems with his 2007 election campaign. On 7 August, Frantz Gumbs was elected as President of the Territorial Council. However, his election was declared invalid on 10 April 2009 and Daniel Gibbs appointed as Acting President of the Territorial Council on 14 April 2009. Gumbs was reelected on 5 May 2009.
Before 2007, Saint Martin was coded as GP (Guadeloupe) in ISO 3166-1. In October 2007, it received the ISO 3166-1 code MF (alpha-2 code), MAF (alpha-3 code), and 663 (numeric code).
