Draft of the New Haitian Penal Code

Prepared by the Ministry of Justice and Public Security and dated March 2015, this is the full draft of the penal code reform: 283 pages opening with Book One on general provisions, whose first title states the principles the reform rests on. Offences are classified by gravity into crimes, délits and contraventions; only the law may define crimes and délits and fix their penalties; nobody may be punished for conduct whose elements the law does not define, nor by a penalty the law does not provide; the criminal law is to be construed strictly and reasoning by analogy is excluded; and the age of criminal responsibility is set at thirteen.

It also gives the criminal courts power to interpret administrative acts and assess their legality where the outcome of the prosecution depends on it. The draft matters because Haiti's penal code was, until 2020, the nineteenth-century text as amended; the code enacted by decree on March 11, 2020 and published in Le Moniteur of June 24, 2020 came out of this work. Holding the draft alongside the enacted code makes the reform legible as a process rather than an event, which is what a reader trying to date a provision or trace an intention actually needs. Recovered from a Wayback capture of haitijustice.com, where it had been posted with the CRIJ legal-information center.