A Century of Legislation on the Press and Communication in Haiti, 1885-1985
- A government-published compilation, by the Ministry of Information's research directorate, of press and communication law from 1885 to 1985.
- It opens with the law of 11 August 1885 on freedom of the press, published in Le Moniteur No. 44 of 24 October 1885.
- That founding law declares printing and bookselling free while requiring each public printed matter to name its printer and to be deposited in five copies for the national collections.
- The ministry's foreword states that the compilation is not exhaustive and is meant to inform interested sectors, not to state the law.
- It is the only consolidated source for a body of law otherwise scattered across largely undigitised Moniteur issues.
- Coverage stops in 1985, so it predates the 1987 Constitution and every instrument since.
Compiled by the Direction de la Recherche et de la Documentation of the Ministry of Information and Coordination and published in Port-au-Prince in 1986, this volume reproduces, in chronological order, the laws and decrees governing the press and communication in Haiti over the century from 1885. It opens with the law of 11 August 1885 on freedom of the press, published in Le Moniteur No. 44 of 24 October 1885, whose first articles declare printing and bookselling free while requiring every public printed matter to name its printer and to be deposited in five copies for the national collections, with the deposit made to the Secretariat in Port-au-Prince and to communal council offices elsewhere.
The ministry's own foreword is candid that the volume is not exhaustive and that the purpose is to inform interested sectors rather than to state the law. That is what makes it useful: press and communication law is a field where the governing instruments are hard to name, and this is a government-published sequence of them. Its practical value is also its limitation, since it stops in 1985 and predates both the 1987 Constitution and every subsequent instrument, including the December 2025 decree on freedom of expression and press offences. Digitised by the Library of Congress copy through the Internet Archive; the extracted text is usable but carries scanning noise from the double-page images.
How to cite
Ministère de l'Information et de la Coordination, 1986, A Century of Legislation on the Press and Communication in Haiti, 1885-1985, https://archive.org/details/unsicledelgi00hait