Human Rights and the Rule of Law in Haiti: Key Recent Developments, December 2024 through June 2025

This update, published July 2025 and covering December 2024 through June 2025, reports that Haiti's governance and insecurity crisis has deteriorated further since IJDH's December 2024 update, with spiraling armed-group violence and profound humanitarian breakdown. Ineffectiveness, corruption and infighting are debilitating the Transitional Presidential Council and prompting stronger calls for its removal, with less than a year remaining on its agreed transition timeline and no meaningful progress toward restoring peace or democracy.

Violations of the right to life and security of the person increased further: over 4,000 people have been killed and more than one million displaced since January, with mutilation, sexual violence, burning of people and property, kidnapping and forced recruitment omnipresent in areas under armed-group control. Armed groups expanded that control into new territories, most notably the Kenscoff area of Port-au-Prince, the Petite-Riviere commune in Artibonite, and the Central Department, while Haiti's police remain weak and largely ineffective at controlling the violence.

An increasing number of non-state actors, including civilian 'defense' groups and private military contractors hired by the Haitian government, are filling the resulting security vacuum, themselves responsible for a growing number of civilian deaths and injuries and other abuses that are largely unchecked and sometimes abetted by police. Multiple Transitional Presidential Council members are credibly accused of corruption and collusion with the armed groups ravaging the country, which the update frames as a perpetuation of the historic patterns of government abuse that precipitated Haiti's crisis in the first place.