MINUJUSTH - Report of the Secretary-General on the United Nations Mission for Justice Support in Haiti (S/2019/563), 9 July 2019

The last full MINUJUSTH report, submitted under resolution 2466 (2019) and covering the period from 1 March to the phased withdrawal ahead of 15 October 2019.

Its observations are bleaker than the March report they follow. Political instability, aggravated by a worsening socioeconomic and security situation, continued to grip Haiti. Protracted negotiations over a new cabinet paralysed the Government and blocked legislation it needed to pass, and the Secretary-General calls the resulting mix of factors potentially explosive. He records that government efforts at the structural reforms which would improve governance and develop the economy had not gone far enough to overcome the despondency felt about the political class, the underperformance of State institutions and the absence of anti-corruption work.

One consequence is fiscal and specific. Turbulence in Parliament and its inability to pass the 2018/19 budget cost Haiti significant international donor funding that could have gone to social protection. A second is electoral: elections were due in 2019 with no budget and the electoral law stalled in Parliament, which he warns risks a constitutional vacuum without immediate investment in preparing the process. A third is the one that has defined the years since. The persistent climate of crisis, he writes, provided fertile ground for an upsurge in criminal gang activity in parts of Port-au-Prince and the Artibonite Department, and reversing it requires a political solution alongside resources for multisectoral approaches to the socioeconomic conditions gangs grow in.

He also notes that none of the attempts at national dialogue had borne fruit, and that the lack of a unified opposition voice reduced the opposition's own capacity to find common ground with the Government.