(2023-08) "Living a Nightmare": Haiti Needs an Urgent Rights-Based Response to Escalating Crisis
Summary — This Human Rights Watch report documents killings, gang rapes and kidnappings by criminal groups in four communes of metropolitan Port-au-Prince between January and April 2023, based on 127 interviews including 58 victims and witnesses. It records 67 killings and 23 rape cases documented directly, situates the violence within political deadlock, police complicity, arms inflows and a dysfunctional judiciary, and calls for a rights-based international response and a legitimate transitional government.
Key Findings
- Human Rights Watch directly documented 67 killings, including 11 children and 12 women, and 23 rape cases, 19 by multiple perpetrators, in four communes of metropolitan Port-au-Prince between January and April 2023.
- BINUH estimated criminal groups killed more than 2,000 people between January and June 2023, an increase of almost 125 percent over the same period in 2022, with 1,014 kidnappings also reported in the first half.
- The G9 blockade of Brooklyn (Cité Soleil) trapped residents behind the Carrefour la Mort checkpoint, where a community organisation recorded around 100 killings and 100 instances of sexual violence over seven weeks in March-April 2023.
- The Bwa Kale popular-justice movement had reportedly killed more than 200 suspected criminal group members by June 2023, often in collusion with police officers, and no prosecutions of the year's killings, kidnappings or sexual violence were identified.
- Nearly half of Haiti's 11.5 million people were acutely food insecure, about 5.2 million needed humanitarian assistance, almost 195,000 were internally displaced, and more than 73,000 people were forcibly returned to Haiti in the first half of 2023.
Full Description
Published in August 2023, this Human Rights Watch report documents abuses by criminal groups in four communes of the Port-au-Prince metropolitan area (Cabaret, Cité Soleil, Croix-des-Bouquets and Port-au-Prince) between January and April 2023. It is based on 127 interviews conducted before, during and after a field visit in late April and early May 2023, including 58 victims and witnesses, civil society, UN and humanitarian representatives, Haitian officials including then Prime Minister Ariel Henry, plus verification of 15 videos and 5 photographs and satellite geolocation. Human Rights Watch directly documented 67 killings, including 11 children and 12 women, and 23 rape cases, 19 of them by multiple perpetrators, concentrated in episodes such as the G9 blockade of Brooklyn (Cité Soleil), where residents crossing the Carrefour la Mort checkpoint were shot or gang-raped; a community organisation recorded around 100 killings and 100 instances of sexual violence there over seven weeks in March-April 2023. BINUH estimated more than 2,000 killings nationwide in January-June 2023, up almost 125 percent year on year, and over 200 deaths from the Bwa Kale popular-justice movement by June 2023. The report links insecurity to political deadlock, decades of criminal influence in politics, police complicity, growing arms and ammunition flows, and an overwhelmed judiciary and prison system, while documenting catastrophic humanitarian conditions with nearly half the population acutely food insecure. It reviews the record of past international interventions and calls for any international force to have human rights protocols, funding and oversight, alongside support for a rights-respecting transitional government.