Law on Free Zones

The free zone law is the enabling statute for the regime under which Haiti's export-oriented assembly industry operates, and therefore for the largest source of formal private employment in the country. It defines what a free zone is, how one is created and operated, the fiscal and customs treatment of enterprises established inside it, and the institutional arrangements for granting and supervising that status. Its constitutional grounding is unusually broad, the preamble citing more than thirty articles of the 1987 Constitution, including the economic-freedom, property and labor provisions. Read alongside trade-preference arrangements such as HOPE and HELP, and alongside the corpus's material on the apparel sector and Better Work Haiti, this is the domestic legal half of the industry's operating framework. Published in Le Moniteur, 157th year, No. 62, Friday 2 August 2002, as an extraordinary issue.