General operating conditions of the peace courts in Haiti: advocacy for a sound and equitable distribution of justice

The peace court is the court most Haitians actually meet, and this study measures the conditions it works in. Between February and July 2021 the network and its regional structures visited 77.40 per cent of the country's functioning peace courts. The report first sets out the geography of the courts and the staff assigned to them, and the legal provisions governing their establishment and operation, including what the network's own preliminary study of 2019 had already found. It then reports what the visits found: which courts were visited and which judicial actors were met, the staff actually in post, the opening hours and the services available, the buildings and their infrastructure, the office space and equipment, and the electricity supply and vehicles.

The recommendations follow from the measurements: enclose every peace court with a boundary wall, clean up their immediate surroundings, give every court working toilets, provide staff with adequate workspace and equipment, computerise the public justice service and replace the machines that need it, revise judicial salaries and pay them on time, give magistrates the same benefits or benefits on clearly stated criteria, and make sure each court has a power source and at least one service vehicle. The study was produced under a project run by Avocats sans frontières Canada, and the report states that its content is the network's responsibility alone.