Haiti: Failed Justice or the Rule of Law? Challenges Ahead for Haiti and the International Community
- The Commission separated the justice system from the general human rights situation and gave it a report of its own, which it has done once in eight Haiti reports.
- Police conduct is broken into named categories instead of one subject: extrajudicial killings, torture, arbitrary arrest and the disciplinary system are each treated separately, and so are the staffing and working conditions behind them.
- The subtitle puts the international community alongside Haiti as an addressee, which places responsibility for the state of the courts partly outside the country.
Adopted by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights on 26 October 2005 and printed in 2006, this is the one report in the Commission's Haiti run whose subject is the administration of justice. The other seven take the general human rights situation.
It opens with the events of 2003 to 2005, the departure of President Aristide and the interim government that followed, and is explicit about where its information came from and how the report was approved. The analysis then sets Haiti's justice obligations against its international and regional treaty commitments and the 1987 Constitution, describes the court system as it stood, and works through the main problems in turn.
Those problems are treated at length and separately: the security situation and the staffing and working conditions of the Haitian National Police; abuses of force attributable to the police, with extrajudicial killings and torture examined as distinct categories; arbitrary arrest; the police disciplinary system; the court system and the problem of impunity; and the prisons and other places of detention.
The report closes on what it would take to build a professional police force and a working court system, addressed to Haiti and to the international community together, as its subtitle announces.
How to cite
Organization of American States (OAS); Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), 2005, Haiti: Failed Justice or the Rule of Law? Challenges Ahead for Haiti and the International Community, https://www.oas.org/en/iachr/reports/cch/country.html
- Rights holder
- Organization of American States (OAS)|Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR)