General conditions of detention and the legal status of prisoners in Haiti

The network has been drawing attention to the prisons for years and records that the promises made in reply have changed nothing, so it puts the conditions and the legal status of prisoners side by side again. In the functioning prisons the general conditions are catastrophic and breach the rights to life, health and physical and mental integrity: overcrowding, promiscuity, the spread of contagious disease, chronic undernourishment and limited access to drinking water. The report goes department by department, beginning with the only functioning prison in the Sud, the civil prison of Les Cayes, where seven of the nineteen cells were burned by detainees after the earthquake of 14 August 2021.

On the legal status, it insists that the only right prisoners lose is freedom of movement and that every other right guaranteed by the Constitution and by the conventions Haiti has ratified stays with them. It asks the prison and judicial authorities to supply every civil prison with enough food, to repair the prisons of the grand sud damaged by the earthquake, to raise guard numbers to international standards, to send on the files of anyone held under a committal order without delay, to hold correctional and criminal hearings quickly enough to reduce the number awaiting trial, and to send the prisons the files of transferred detainees so that those who have served their sentences can be released.