Draft Constitution of the Republic of Haiti, May 2025

The draft Constitution submitted to the nation in May 2025 by the Comité de Pilotage de la Conférence Nationale, the body created by the decree of 17 July 2024 as part of the state-refoundation process. Its presentation note describes the text as a first draft, the product of months of exchanges, public consultations and departmental and diaspora assemblies, and invites comments between 22 May and 21 June 2025. The text runs to 240 articles. It keeps a bicameral legislature but reduces the Senate to two senators per department and gives each arrondissement one deputy, with both chambers serving five-year terms and the Chamber renewed in full.

The President is elected by direct universal suffrage on an absolute majority of votes cast, with a second round between the top two, for a five-year term renewable once and with no extension or third term permitted; the presidential election is held on the last Sunday of September of the fifth year and the president takes office on the following 7 February. Executive power is exercised by the President assisted by a Prime Minister, ministers and secretaries of State. A Conseil Constitutionnel appears throughout as the forum for challenges to communal and departmental acts.

On the questions that have driven Haitian constitutional debate, the draft states that the right to vote, to stand for office and to hold public office belongs equally to Haitians living in the country and abroad, and it commits to women's representation and to effective participation by young people. This is the substantive text a constitutional referendum would put to voters, and therefore the companion to the referendum decrees rather than a background paper.