Security crisis and the situation of internally displaced people in Haiti: advocacy for an adequate state response

The report was written by the RNDDH, the Collectif des avocat.e.s spécialisé.e.s en litige stratégique des droits humains and Avocats sans frontières Canada under the AJULIH project funded by Global Affairs Canada. It sets out the security crisis and then the Haitian state's responsibility for it and for the management of internally displaced people, working from Article 22 of the American Convention on Human Rights, principles 5 to 9 of the Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement, and articles 19, 259, 260 and 261 of the amended 1987 Constitution.

Its case is built on failures it names: the duty to protect and guarantee the rights of citizens affected by massacres and other armed attacks, the shortcomings in protecting the population, and the insufficient resources given to the police, illustrated by police abandoning the Estère station in February 2023 and the Petite-Rivière-de-l'Artibonite station being vandalised and burned in April. It draws on IOM displacement figures for the Ouest and on the network's own massacre reporting: between 2018 and 2023 the RNDDH documented more than nineteen of the twenty-four major massacres and armed attacks committed in Haiti. The document carries its own permission to copy, distribute, transmit and adapt with attribution, which is why it is served here while the rest of the publisher's library is not.