MPs have criticised the government’s handling of a meeting between Queen Maxima and the Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman for not mentioning the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

GroenLinks MP Bram van Oijk said during a debate on Monday that the queen had been ‘sent into a political minefield’ when she sat down with the prince at the G20 summit. Maxima, a former banker, attended the summit in her role as a UN ambassador specialising in access to finance in developing countries.

UN investigators have implicated the prince in the death of Khashoggi, who was killed in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in October 2018. Saudi Arabia has maintained it was a ‘rogue operation’, but Turkey said his murder was ordered at the highest level of the Saudi government.

Agnes Callamard, UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial executions, said Maxima’s silence on the issue was a form of complicity. ‘It’s one thing to meet this man, quite another to say nothing,’ she told AD. ‘If you do not speak and do not demand justice, it suggests you have no concerns.’

Foreign minister Stef Blok told MPs that a scheduled meeting with the incoming chair of next year’s G20 was the wrong place to discuss the killing. ‘These conversations should focus on access to financial services and not get mixed up with wider political issues,’ he said.

Blok echoed the words of prime minister Mark Rutte, who said at the weekend that the Netherlands had already expressed its disgust at the killing of Khashoggi through the appropriate channels.

‘It would have been completely inappropriate if Maxima had put it on the agenda,’ said Rutte. ‘The Netherlands is doing that bilaterally by all means possible.’

Blok said the government had chosen to let the meeting go ahead despite the recent publication of a UN report that cited Salman’s alleged role in the murder. ‘If we had cancelled the meeting, we would have been interfering politically with the important work that the queen does.’

However, D66 foreign affairs spokesman Sjoerd Sjoerdsma said the meeting allowed the Saudis to present the crown prince as a credible world leader, giving the impression that the government ‘understands nothing about diplomacy and even less about image making.’