Report on the criminal assizes of the 2008-2009 judicial year

Five hundred cases were scheduled for the assizes with and without a jury, four hundred and twenty-two were heard and seventy-eight were adjourned for lost files, absent witnesses or want of coordination between judicial authorities. Seven hundred and sixteen people were tried: four hundred and seventeen convicted, one hundred and sixty-four released and one hundred and thirty-five returned to prison. Sexual violence was given particular attention, with one hundred and nine people tried for rape, sexual assault or indecency and seventy-three sentenced to hard labour of up to fifteen years. Notorious armed offenders and police officers were among those convicted.

Several jurisdictions had to limit the number of sittings for want of money and others, Mirebalais and Les Cayes among them, lack the magistrates to hold them at all; files reach the bench empty of evidence, and in Port-au-Prince at least one was lost by the prosecutor's office. The network concludes that seventeen jurisdictions did organise sessions and that the effect on the number of people awaiting trial was very small, and would have been visible only with the means to hold larger sessions. It asks for magistrates in every jurisdiction, sanctions against absent witnesses and jurors, funding for the courts, better-prepared prosecution files, investigating magistrates' orders within the legal deadline, and a structure to follow the execution of sentences, which Haitian judges, it says, do not concern themselves with.