In an opinion piece written for NRC Handelsblad, Joost Lagendijk, a former member of the European parliament for the Dutch green party and a senior adviser at the Istanbul Policy Center, criticised Dutch foreign minister Maxime Verhagen’s “selective indignation” when it comes to human rights.

Lagendijk accused Verhagen of being ‘tough’ on small countries (Serbia) and ‘soft’ on big countries like Russia or China, where economic interests prevail.

In his response, minister Verhagen takes issue with wath he calls “Lagendijk’s suggestion that the ideal of human rights is opposed to defending Dutch economic interests”.

“We adhere to the same principles everywhere; we stand up for human rights everywhere,” Verhagen writes. “But the way in which we do so is determined by the question of how effective we can be. Tact must not be confused with laxity. What approach will enable us to achieve the most? This is always the main question.”

What do you think about Verhagen’s standpoint on human rights, which he himself has made the focus of Dutch foreign policy?

The Amsterdam Medical Centre wants to offer single women in their thirties the option to freeze their eggs while they wait for Mr Right. If Prince Charming appears before they are 50, they should be able to get pregnant through in vitro fertilisation. The planned treatment – to start in 2010 – has stirred up supporters and opponents. Within days, twenty women called the AMC to inquire about their eligibility for the procedure, but a majority of parliament is against it.

In an opinion article in NRC Handelsblad, Janneke Schermers, a member of parliament for the ruling Christian democrat party, called it “a succession of unnatural procedures with a high risk of complications”. She feels “medical science should be used only for medical purposes: curing diseases and treating anomalies”.

NRC Handelsblad, in its editorial, said there are no decisive objections to the treatment because there is no strong argument to decry this so-called ‘wishful medicine’. Many other treatments that are not directly related to curing diseases are already accepted. “A woman who has her egg cells frozen in order to use them at a later age is, in essence, doing much the same as a woman who takes the pill and stops at a certain moment when she wants to have children. Both cases involve some ‘tinkering’ with nature,” according to the editorial.

However, the editorial agrees with Schermers that high infant mortality in the Netherlands, partly due to the late average age at which women are having children, is a concern.

What do you think? Should we let nature take its course, and are some women just not meant to reproduce? Or would that mean a ban on freezing sperm, IVF and many other treatments as well, and should we see these procedures as medical progress that can make a number of people very happy?

The Netherlands’ tolerant drugs policy is up in the air. This fall the government plans to draw up new policies to give national direction to a variety of local initiatives to clamp down on the tolerated sale of cannabis. In the Netherlands, cannabis users are not prosecuted and coffee shops are licensed, but the cultivation and wholesale of cannabis are still prohibited.

A report published on Thursday calls on the government to push the cannabis-selling coffee shops back to their original purpose, they should be limited in number and size and cater to registered local users rather than the “large-scale facilities that supply consumers from neighbouring countries” they have become.

Cities and villages on the German and Belgian border are suffering from the influx of drug tourists who come to the Netherlands to buy large quantities of hash and weed. However, tourists in Amsterdam who make a visit to a local coffee shop as part of their holiday are not seen as a huge problem. If a registration system limiting the access to members only is implemented, those tourists experiences could be a thing of the past as well.

Personal experiences in Amsterdam coffee shops aside, what do you think about the Dutch policy and the political intentions to change this? Is the current policy sustainable within a united Europe? Won’t restricting the sale of cannabis to locals just move the sale of soft drugs to the streets again?