Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti

Fanm Pale translates to Women Speak. Our partners in Haiti used this blog from 2010-2011. Click HERE to see Fanm Pale the blog.

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Coming Monday, April 1, we are revealing our new, user-friendly site.

 Click HERE to read the Press Release about the IACHR telling the Haitian
Government to stop violent evictions from earthquake displacement camps and provide clean water.

 

 

 

 

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact:
Mario Joseph, Av., Managing Attorney, Bureau des Avocats Internationaux (BAI), Mario@ijdh.org, 011+ 509‑3701-9879 (Haiti – speaks French and Haitian Creole)

Nicole Phillips, Esq., Staff Attorney, Institute for Justice & Democracy in Haiti (IJDH), Nicole@ijdh.org, 510–715-2855 (U.S. – speaks English and French)

Inter-American Commission on Human Rights tells Haitian government
to prevent excessive force and violence in evictions from earthquake displacement camp

(Port-au-Prince, March 27, 2013)— Yesterday, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights granted precautionary measures to residents of Grace Village, one of approximately 450 earthquake displacement camps in Haiti.  The Commission advised the Government of Haiti to immediately take steps to prevent any violent evictions and provide clean water and security to camp residents, especially women and children.

Human rights lawyer Mario Joseph of the Bureau des Avocats Internationaux (BAI), who, along with Défenseurs des Opprimés (Defenders of the Oppressed) and the Institute for Justice & Democracy in Haiti (IJDH) filed the claim with the Commission, calls the precautionary measures a significant victory and says the Haitian government “should not be sending police to support unlawful and violent evictions like in Grace Village.  The government must require land owners to follow proper legal eviction procedures and give residents adequate notice and legal recourse to defend their rights.”

Earlier this month, Amnesty International called for urgent action against the “constant campaign of intimidation against camp residents” at Grace Village by the alleged owner of the land. Grace Village authorities blocked humanitarian organizations from providing aid to residents, obtained arrest warrants against camp residents trying to protect their rights, and instructed private security to throw rocks at residents at night. As a result, camp residents live in inhumane conditions with little to no access to food, shelter or clean water, and are under constant fear of violent evictions. This is in direct contrast to claims by Grace International, Inc., which collects donations to manage the camp, that it runs a “model” camp that provides well water, showers, toilets and garbage disposal.

Unfortunately Grace Village is just one of hundreds of camps being threatened with unlawful eviction.  Earlier this month the United Nations expressed “grave concern of the humanitarian community in Haiti regarding the recent incidents of forced evictions of internally displaced persons (IDPs) from camps in Port-au-Prince.”  The UN estimates that 20 percent of the 350,000 Haitian still living in earthquake displacement camps will face eviction in 2013.

Nicole Phillips, Staff Attorney with IJDH says the Commission’s recommendations “reconfirm that forced evictions from displacement camps not only add trauma to earthquake victims, but also violate Haitian and international human rights standards.” Phillips says she is sympathetic to landowners still hosting displacement camps three years after the earthquake, but says “landowners should raise their concerns with the Haitian government and international community who have not provided adequate housing to earthquake victims, rather than waging violence against displaced communities desperate to find a safe home.”

 

Click HERE to see the more infor­ma­tion about Hous­ing Rights Advo­cacy Project (HRAP)
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ORGANISATION DES ÉTATS AMÉRICAINS
WASHINGTON, D.C. 2 0 0 0 6 — ÉTATS-UNIS

le 26 mars 2013
REF: 567 familles résidents du Village Grace
Mesures conservatoires MC-52–13
Haïti

Messieurs,
J’ai l’honneur de m’adresser à vous, au nom de la Commission interaméricaine des
droits de l’homme (CIDH), pour traiter de votre requête portant sur les mesures conservatoires en faveur des résidents du camp de déplacés Grâce Village situé à Carrefour.
À cet effet, j’ai le plaisir de vous informer qu’en date de ce jour, la CIDH s’est adressée à
l’État, selon les prescriptions de l’article 25 de son Règlement, pour lui demander que des
mesures soient adoptées de toute urgence en faveur des personnes susmentionnées.
Concrètement, la Commission a demandé au Gouvernement ce qui suit:
1. D’adopter les mesures nécessaires pour éviter l’usage excessif de la force et la violence dans toute expulsion. En particulier, garantir que les actions des autorités publiques ainsi que celles des particuliers ne posent pas de risque à la vie et à l’intégrité personnelle des résidents du camp;
2. D’implémenter des mesures de sécurité effectives, en particulier, d’assurer un patrouille adéquat autour et à l’intérieur du camp et d’installer des commissariats de police à proximité du camp. À cet effet, la CIDH demande au Gouvernement d’accorder une protection spéciale aux femmes et aux enfants;
3. D’assurer que les résidents ont accès à l’eau potable nécessaire aux besoins basiques;
4. De concerter avec les bénéficiaires et ses représentants les mesures qui doivent être adoptées. En particulier, veiller à ce que le comité de résidents du camp ainsi que les groupes de femmes de base aient pleine participation dans la planification et exécution des mesures implémentées à la faveur des résidents, dont des mesures destinées à la prévention de la violence sexuelle et d’autres formes de violence dans le camp ; et
5. D’informer au sujet des mesures adoptées afin d’enquêter sur les faits qui justifient l’adoption des mesures conservatoires.

Messieurs
Mario Joseph
Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti

Patrice Florvilus

De même, elle a sollicité la présentation, dans un délai de 30 (trente) jours, des
informations sur l’implémentation des mesures conservatoires qui ont été adoptées, et
l’actualisation de ces informations sur une base périodique. Après avoir écouté les observations des parties, la Commission décidera s’il convient de proroger ces mesures ou de les abroger.
Il convient de noter que, conformément aux dispositions de l’article 25(9) du Règlement
de la CIDH, l’adoption de mesures conservatoires ne préjuge en rien du fond de la question.
La CIDH publie sur son site internet (www.cidh.org) un résumée des mesures conservatoires octroyées. Dans celui-ci, l’identité des bénéficiaires des mesures conservatoires, à l’exception du nom des enfants et des victimes de violences sexuelles, est publiée. Les bénéficiaires des mesures conservatoires présentes qui préfèrent que leur nom complet ne soit pas divulgué sur le site internet devront informer par écrit à la CIDH de forme immédiate.
Je vous prie d’agréer, Messieurs, l’expression de mes salutations distinguées.

Click HERE to see the more information about Housing Rights Advocacy Project (HRAP)
Click HERE to see the PDF version

Filed by:
Mario Joseph
Bureau Des Avocats Internationaux
Patrice Florvilus
Défenseurs des Opprimés
Nicole Phillips
Brian Concannon
Institute for Justice & Democracy in Haiti

I. PARTIES
1. The Bureau des Avocats Internationaux (“BAI”), Défenseurs des Opprimés (“DOP”), and Institute for Justice & Democracy in Haiti (“IJDH”) respectfully request that the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (“Inter-American Commission,” or “Commission”) issue precautionary measures pursuant to Article 25(1) of its Rules of Procedure on behalf of certain internally displaced persons (“IDPs”)1 living in Haiti, who are facing the risk of imminent forced eviction and accompanying irreparable harm.
2. BAI, DOP, and IJDH make this request on behalf of four individuals who were displaced in the aftermath of the January 12, 2010 earthquake and are currently living in an IDP camp on land known as Grace Village (“Grace Village”). We also represent the entire community of 576 families (approximately 3000 people) that lives within Grace Village. The residents of Grace Village are at risk of serious and irreparable harm due to the Haitian government’s assistance in and failure to prevent an ongoing series of extrajudicial forced evictions at the camp and the accompanying violence, threats, mistreatment, and deplorable living conditions currently plaguing Grace Village.
3. The Haitian government has an obligation to protect individuals being forcibly evicted from privately owned camps. The Haitian Government should fulfill its responsibility towards the displaced community, but is instead assisting private parties like Grace Village authorities in carrying out unlawful, violent evictions. The government’s inaction and complicity in the evictions have created a serious, urgent situation that necessitates the issuance of precautionary measures. Except for former Grace Village resident Marcel Germain, a human rights defender who fled the camp to protect his safety, petitioners have asked that their identities remain confidential from the State of Haiti under Article 28 of the Rules of Procedure.
4. This request asserts a serious and urgent situation in which IDP victims living in Grace Village have suffered and continue to suffer irreparable harm and are unable to obtain protection or relief from the pertinent domestic authorities. As Amnesty International and several media outlets have reported, residents have been routinely terrorized by authorities who manage Grace Village to leave the IDP camp since at least 2011.2 The situation has become more urgent in the last few days. On February 15, 2013, Grace Village authorities removed the front metal gate to
1 Internally displaced persons (“IDPs”) are persons who are forced to flee their homes or residences as a result of armed conflict, violence, human rights violations, or man-made or natural disasters, but who have not crossed an internationally recognized border. UN Doc. E/CN/4/1998/53/Add/2., Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement, United Nations Office for Humanitarian Affairs.
2 See Amnesty International, Urgent Action: Families at Risk of Forced Eviction in Haiti (May 15, 2012) [hereinafter Amnesty International, May 15, 2012), available at http://www.amnestyusa.org/sites/default/files/uaa13512.pdf (urging citizens, human rights advocates to send a petition to the mayor’s office to stop forced evictions); Invisible Grace, PRI’s The World, Amy Braken (Aug. 27, 2012) http://www.theworld.org/2012/08/invisible-grace/; Church vs The Displaced at Carrfour, Haiti Reporters, http://vimeo.com/34788206 (2012); Homeless Families Face Forced Intimidation and Forced Eviction from Church Property, Etant Dupain (May 16, 2012) available at http://www.lethaitilive.org/news-english/2012/5/16/homeless-haitian-families-face-intimidation-and-forced-evict.html.
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the camp, leaving the 3000 or some residents in tarp shelters vulnerable to intruders such as gangs and thieves. Residents learned that Grace Village authorities had obtained an arrest warrant on behalf of two residents, including Petitioner Marcel Germain, causing both residents to flee in hiding. Two cars with armed Haitian police officers in uniforms arrived at the site that evening, but only spoke with Grace Village authorities next to the camp; they did not enter the camp or speak with residents. Later that evening, Grace Village security threw rocks at the shelters. The residents reported being unable to sleep and spent the night “standing on their two legs” for fear of an attack from security, the police or outside gangs who could freely enter their camp. On February 18, 2013, residents reported that police came to the camp and arrested one of the camp committee members. Police indicated that they had a list of several camp residents that they will be arresting, including members of the camp committee.
5. Residents believe they will continue to be terrorized and wrongfully imprisoned until and unless the Commission issues precautionary measures to the Haitian government requiring them to recognize residents’ human rights and protect them against the ongoing unlawful and violent forced eviction.
II. SUMMARY OF ARGUMENTS

6. Grace Village is an IDP camp located at 54 Lamentin in the Carrefour Commune in Zone St. Charles. The camp is one of the many makeshift camps that were formed in or around Port-au-Prince in the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake. According to the International Organization for Migration (“IOM”) Displacement Tracking Matrix (“DTM”), approximately 567 families live in Grace Village, accounting for a little over 3,000 individuals.3
7. Pastor Joel Jeune, founder of the Grace International church and Grace International Inc., a 501©(3) non-profit organization registered in Florida, is the alleged owner of the land upon which Grace Village is located. Although Pastor Joel Jeune has delegated the administration of Grace Village to his son Michael Jeune and camp administrator Marc Antoine, he remains in charge. Residents’ testimonies reveal that nothing occurs inside the camp without the Pastor’s knowledge. He is very influential in the local city of Carrefour, just outside Port-au-Prince. Close ties to the mayor’s office and the local police force him to enlist the help of Haitian police to carry out illegal evictions. With his private security forces and the Haitian police, Pastor Joel Jeune has orchestrated and participated in violent, forced evictions of displaced families living inside Grace Village. According to residents, Yvon Jerome, the former mayor of Carrefour, was reluctant to assist the displaced community inside Grace Village because of his personal relationship with Pastor Joel, and because the Pastor’s son, Danny Jeune, works in the Mayor’s office.
8. Although residents have never seen proof of ownership of the land on which Grace Village is located, Pastor Joel has taken great efforts to reclaim the land from camp residents. Since the camp was established in 2010, Pastor Jeune and his employees have instituted a rule of terror inside the camp, harassing, brutalizing, and terrorizing residents with forced evictions.
3 See Displacement Tracking Matrix, INT’L. ORG. FOR MIGRATION, http://iomhaitidataportal.info/dtm/index2.aspx (follow “DTM Report-English version” hyperlink) (last visited December 12, 2012).
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Pastor Joel’s plans for the land are still unclear, but his actions show that he is willing to use disreputable means to evict the displaced community living there, or in the alternative, force these vulnerable families to leave by making their lives unbearable. Recent interviews of Grace Village residents conducted by human rights activists reveal that residents live in inhumane conditions with little to no access to food, shelter, clean water, health services, and are under constant fear of violent evictions from Pastor Joel and his hired security forces.
4 This is in direct contrast to claims by Grace International, Inc., through which Pastor Joel receives donations for managing the camp, that it runs a “model” camp that provides well water, showers, toilets and garbage disposal.5
9. The unsanitary living conditions inside the camp are attributed to Pastor Joel’s refusal to allow aid organizations inside the camp to provide services to residents, and his refusal to allow these residents to maintain a clean environment.6 As late as December 1, 2012, the IOM attempted to build latrines on the property but were stopped by Pastor Joel. Impending forced evictions, coupled with the lack of security inside the camp and the numerous health hazards that exist, make it highly likely that Grace Village residents are at risk of imminent, irreparable harm.
10. To make matters worse, due to its location along Haiti’s eastern coastline, Grace Village is at risk of the destructive effects of hurricanes, tropical storms and landslides.7 The lack of adequate sanitary infrastructure within Grace Village makes this risk even more serious. Children are especially vulnerable to life threatening infectious diseases such as cholera, which has already killed more than 8,000 Haitians since the earthquake.8
11. Grace Village residents have been subjected to forced evictions from both Haitian officials and alleged private landowners since the camp was established in 2010. In October of 2010, the increasing concern for the safety and well-being of similarly situated displaced communities all over the Port-au-Prince area compelled a group of organizations, including Petitioners BAI and IJDH, to file a request for precautionary measures for five IDP camps.9 During a Thematic Hearing before the Commission in October 2010, the BAI, IJDH, and several other organizations expressed concern for the safety of displaced communities in Haiti and requested that the Commission take notice of the Government of Haiti’s failure to protect this vulnerable group. Detailing the factual circumstances in five particular IDP camps, we requested that the Commission grant precautionary measures on behalf of the displaced community within
4 See Amnesty International, May 15, 2012, supra note 2 (urging citizens, human rights advocates to send a petition to the mayor’s office to stop forced evictions).
5 Grace International, Inc. website, http://www.graceintl.org/pages.asp?pageid=97692, last viewed Feb. 17, 2013.
6 Factual Declaration of Marcel Germain. All factual declarations are on file with Petitioners. The factual declarations of Nicole Phillips, Ellie Happel, Maria-Elena Kolovos, and Patrice Florvilus were all made in support of the petitioners’ request for precautionary measures based on interviews and events they personally witnessed. The factual declarations of EJ, JL, and AD all reflect the testimony of individuals living within Grace Village who asked to remain anonymous. Marcel Germain, a former Grace Village resident, gave permission for his identity to be disclosed.
7 NOAA raises hurricane season prediction despite expected El Niño, NAT’L OCEANIC AND ATMOSPHERIC ADM. (Aug. 9, 2012), http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2012/20120809_atlantic_hurricane_season_update.html.
8 Haiti Earthquake Facts and Figures, DISASTERS EMERGENCY COMMITTEE, available at http://www.dec.org.uk/haiti-earthquake-facts-and-figures (last visited December 12, 2012).
9 See Precautionary Measures, INTER-AM. C.H.R., Report No. MC-367–10 (November 16, 2010) [hereinafter Precautionary Measures] (describing the vulnerability of displaced communities inside IDP camps).
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each of these five camps.
10 Although Grace Village was not one of the five named IDP camps in the 2010 request for precautionary measures, this request nevertheless also sought remedies for all similarly situated displaced communities, which would have included Grace Village. In a February 2012 letter to the Commission, we also provided updates on the precarious living conditions in Haitian IDP camps, including the particular circumstances facing Grace Village residents.11
12. Grace Village residents live under the constant threat of forced evictions, a pervasive practice that involves the “involuntary removal of persons from their home or land.”12 These evictions are often associated with violence, with both private security guards and the Haitian police harassing and terrorizing displaced families during these forced evictions. Some residents have reported being suddenly woken up by security guards slashing machetes through their tents, and still other residents have been forced to lie on the ground during these forced evictions as police officers kick them. In addition, the evictions also lack any form of judicial review, and any attempts to redress these wrongs through the proper judicial channels in Haiti have been consistently met with indifference from Haitian authorities. These actions are inconsistent with the IDP communities’ right to adequate housing and to be free from forced evictions, which is enshrined in Article 11.1 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (“ICESCR”) and General Comment 7, which Haiti ratified in January 2012, and also in Article 22 of Haiti’s own constitution.13 The Haitian government is therefore violating its obligations under the ICESCR and its own domestic legislation by failing to prevent forced evictions and failing to take appropriate action against either its own agents or private individuals who carry out forced evictions in Grace Village.
13. Furthermore, the Haitian government’s failure to protect a vulnerable group, while simultaneously assisting non-state actors in brutalizing this vulnerable group, violates the Equal Protection clause enshrined in Article 24 of the American Convention on Human Rights.14 Finally, the Haitian government’s failure to protect displaced families in Grace Village from forced evictions interferes with these individuals’ exercise of fundamental rights, including the right to life, personal liberty, privacy, family, property, and judicial protection, as guaranteed by the Inter-American Convention.
10 See IACHR Hearing on Unlawful Forced Evictions in Haiti: Testimony of Mario Joseph, INST. FOR JUSTICE & DEMOCRACY IN HAITI (Oct. 2010), available at http://ijdh.org/archives/15232; see also Precautionary Measures, supra note 9. The measures requested were as follows: (1) adopt a moratorium on evictions of camps of internally displaced persons until a new government is in place; (2) ensure that persons who were illegally evicted from camps are rehoused in locations that meet minimum levels of salubrity and security; (3) guarantee internally displaced persons effective recourse before tribunals and other competent authorities; (4) implement effective security measures to safeguard the physical security of camp residents, guaranteeing special protection to women and children; (5) train law enforcement personnel on the rights of displaced persons, in particular the right to not be forcibly evicted; and (6) ensure international agents of cooperation access to camps of internally displaced persons.
11 See Letter to IACHR on Forced Evictions in Haiti and Request for New Precautionary Measures, INST. FOR JUSTICE & DEMOCRACY IN HAITI (Feb. 27, 2012), available at http://ijdh.org/archives/25449 (updating the Commission on the situation of five IDP camps that were granted Precautionary Measures, and drawing attention on the deplorable situation in Grace Village camp).
12 Housing Rights Legislation: Review of International & National Legal Instruments, UN HOUSING RIGHTS PROGRAMME, Report No. 1, 1, 45 (2002), available at http://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Publications/HousingRightsen.pdf
13 U.N. Comm. on Econ., Soc., & Cultural Rights, General Comment 7: The right to adequate housing (art. 11.1 of the Covenant): forced evictions, 16th Sess., U.N. Doc. E/1998/22 (May 20, 1997) [hereinafter CESCR General Comment 7]; see also HAITI CONST. ART. 22 (1987), available at http://pdba.georgetown.edu/constitutions/haiti/haiti1987.html (recognizing “the right of every citizen to decent housing, education, food, and social security).
14 American Convention on Human Rights, art. 24, Nov. 21, 1969, 1144 U.N.T.S. 143 [hereinafter American Convention].
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14. Precautionary Measures for Grace Village are necessary to prevent irreparable harm and stave off a humanitarian catastrophe. The Haitian government’s inaction and indifference to the plight of the displaced community living in Grace Village constitute clear violations of the government’s obligations under its own constitution, the American Convention on Human Rights to which it is party, and several other international conventions. While there is no duty to provide housing for every citizen, the government of Haiti has a duty to protect its most vulnerable citizens, and the Equal Protection clause of the Inter-American Convention prohibits discriminations based on individuals’ race, sex, or economic position.15
III. METHODOLOGY
15. Human rights activists working with displaced communities in Port-au-Prince collected the information about conditions and events in Grace Village for this petition for precautionary measures based on their own observations of the camp and in-person interviews with camp residents and local officials. The most recent visit to the camp by investigators was February 16, 2013. Interviews were conducted at the camp in Carrefour and in a law office in Port-au-Prince. Investigations and interviews were conducted by human rights lawyers associated with one or more of Petitioner organizations. Interviewees were either a client of Maitre Patrice Florvilus, a lawyer working for Petitioner DOP who has been representing Grace Village residents in filing criminal complaints against camp administrators, or were referred to DOP by Marcel Germain. As a former Grace Village resident and president of a committee representing Grace Village residents, Marcel is very familiar with this particular IDP camp. Residents were asked questions about how they have been treated while living in Grace Village and any types of threats they may have witnessed or received. Interviewers asked each interviewee to assure that he or she was telling the truth, and explained that their statements would be used in a petition to the Commission.16
IV. BACKGROUND

a. Inhumane Conditions in Haiti Since the January 12, 2010 Earthquake
16. The Republic of Haiti is located in the Caribbean Sea, occupying one third of the Island of Hispaniola.17 Like many countries in the world, Haiti has a history of natural disasters such as tropical storms, hurricanes, flooding, landslides and recently, health epidemics such as cholera.18 But due to the state’s extreme poverty and underdevelopment, Haitians lack the resources for emergency management to deal with these natural catastrophes.19 For instance, prior to the 2010 earthquake, more than 70 percent of the Haitian population of approximately 10.1 million people was living on less than US$2 per day, making Haiti the poorest state in the Western
15 Id.
16 Factual declaration of Maria-Elena Kolovos, Sept. 27, 2012.
17 CIA World Fact Book, Haiti: Country Profile, available at https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/ha.html.
18 Haiti: Country Profile, BBC NEWS (last updated Oct. 17, 2012), http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/country_ profiles/1202772.stm.
19 Vulnerability Risk Reduction, and Adaptation to Climate Change: Haiti, WORLD BANK GROUP (April 2011), available at http://sdwebx.worldbank.org/climateportalb/doc/GFDRRCountryProfiles/wb_gfdrr_climate_change_country_profile_for_HTI.pdf.
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Hemisphere.
20 In addition, 86 percent of the population in Port-au-Prince, the nation’s capital, was living in slum-like conditions. Half the population in Port-au-Prince lacked latrines and other sanitary equipment, and a third of the population in Port-au-Prince did not have access to clean water.21 The effects of these natural disasters on the population were exacerbated by the extreme poverty and lack of resources.
17. Despite a long history of natural disasters, the worst one to have ever hit Haiti came in the form of a 7.0 magnitude earthquake that hit Port-au-Prince on January 12, 2010.22 The earthquake killed an estimated 220,000 people and injured more than 300,000.23 It also affected approximately 3.5 million people who were already vulnerable due to extreme poverty.24 The 2010 earthquake destroyed over 200,000 homes, forcing 1.5 million people out of their homes and into makeshift camps where they endured deplorable living conditions and faced harassment and intimidation from landowners. 25
18. The plight of communities displaced by the earthquake was so severe that it prompted international concern.26 Some international officials noted that the fate of these communities in Haiti was a “protracted humanitarian crisis”27 because of the horrible living conditions of camp residents, the health hazards that they present for the displaced community, as well as the increasing human rights abuses that residents face from both government officials and non-state actors.28 In addition to recovering from the trauma of a 7.0 magnitude earthquake, displaced families were also facing forced evictions and the violence associated with these evictions perpetrated by both the Haitian government and non-state actors. Moreover, the unsanitary living conditions inside these IDP camps (such as the lack of sanitary facilities, clean water, and emergency healthcare) exposed already vulnerable displaced communities to life threatening infectious diseases.29 On November 2, 2010, growing concern for the safety of the displaced communities prompted a group of human rights organizations, including Petitioners BAI and IJDH, to file a request for precautionary measures before the Commission against the government of Haiti for its failure to protect camp residents from illegal forced evictions and the associated violence that occurred during these evictions.30
19. Although the number of persons officially living in IDP camps reportedly dwindled from
20 Haiti Earthquake Facts and Figures, DISASTERS EMERGENCY COMMITTEE, available at http://www.dec.org.uk/haiti-earthquake-facts-and-figures (last visited December 12, 2012).
21 Id.
22 Id.
23 Id.
24 Id.
25 Id.
26 Deborah Sontag, Years After Haiti Quake, Safe Housing Is a Dream for Many, N.Y. TIMES (Aug. 15, 2012), http://www.nytime s.com/2012/08/16/world/americas/years-after-haiti-quake-safe-housing-is-dream-for-multitudes.html?pagewanted=all.
27 Id.
28 Id.
29 See Precautionary Measures, supra note 9.
30 Id. The measures requested were as follows: (1) adopt a moratorium on evictions of camps of internally displaced persons until a new government is in place; (2) ensure that persons who were illegally evicted from camps are rehoused in locations that meet minimum levels of salubrity and security; (3) guarantee internally displaced persons effective recourse before tribunals and other competent authorities; (4) implement effective security measures to safeguard the physical security of camp residents, guaranteeing special protection to women and children; (5) train law enforcement personnel on the rights of displaced persons, in particular the right to not be forcibly evicted; and (6) ensure international agents of cooperation access to camps of internally displaced persons.
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1,536,447 people in July 2010 to 369,353 people by August 2012,
31 the living conditions of the remaining displaced persons three years after the earthquake remain precarious, if not worse.32 Moreover, recent data on the remaining people living in IDP camps also fails to properly reflect the thousands of people that were forcibly evicted without alternate housing provisions, many of whom are now living on the fringes of society in their own makeshift camps.
20. Three years after the earthquake, Haitians continue to be victimized, this time by the Haitian government’s unwillingness to provide long-term, sustainable housing solutions, and its refusal to stop non-state actors from terrorizing, harassing, and brutalizing the vulnerable communities living inside these camps.33 The situation in Haiti is still so unstable that on October 1, 2012, the United States Department of Homeland Security announced it would extend for another 18 months Temporary Protected Status for Haitians coming to or already in the United States.34
21. Billions of dollars in recovery aid has been pledged by the international community to assist in rebuilding efforts, but three years after the earthquake, the government still has yet to meet victims’ most basic needs, including access to clean water and health care, adequate housing, and security. Although over 200,000 homes were destroyed after the 2010 earthquake and 1.5 million individuals became homeless as a result, less than 19,000 houses had been repaired and only 6,000 permanent houses had been built.35 While some ten thousand families were able to secure a modicum of reconstruction assistance to rebuild their lives, several thousand Haitians still live in “fetid camps,” lacking the most basic needs and under constant threat of forced eviction.36 Grace Village, is facing a situation so precarious as to require immediate attention to prevent imminent harm to the more than 500 families still living there.37
b. The Precarious Post-Earthquake Housing Situation in Haiti
22. Over a million people lost their homes in the earthquake that struck Haiti on January 12, 2010. Most survivors sought refuge in camps constructed of tents and tarpaulins on open land, including highway medians, public parks, golf courses, and land in front of the collapsed National Palace. Included in the ranks of those evicted are families with small children, single mothers, orphaned children, the elderly, and other vulnerable populations most in need of aid and assistance.
23. As of January 2013, some 358,000 Haitians have still not been able to find housing since
31 See Displacement Tracking Matrix, supra note 3.
32 See Sontag, supra note 26 (describing the terrible living conditions inside IDP camps two and a half years after the earthquake).
33 See Amnesty International, May 15, 2012, supra note 2.
34Temporary Protected Status Extended for Haitians, US CITIZENSHIP AND IMMIGRATION SERVICES (Oct. 1, 2012), http://www.uscis.gov/portal/site/uscis/menuitem.5af9bb95919f35e66f614176543f6d1a/?vgnextoid=29a2c566e8c1a310VgnVCM100000082ca60aRCRD&vgnextchannel=68439c7755cb9010VgnVCM10000045f3d6a1RCRD.
35 See Haiti Earthquake Facts and Figures, supra note 8; see also From Camps to Communities: Haiti Emergency Shelter & Camp Coordination Camp Management, available at http://www.eshelter-ccmhaiti.info/jl/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=101&Url= (last visited December 12, 2012); see also Haiti by the Numbers, Three Years Labor, Center for Economic and Policy Research (January 9, 2013) (last visited February 19, 2013).
36 See Sontag, supra note 26.
37 See Displacement Tracking Matrix, supra note 3.
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the earthquake and are forced to live in IDP camps.
38 In general, people living in camps have nowhere else to go. According to surveys, over 90% of residents living in camps cannot return to their pre-earthquake homes because they were still damaged from the earthquake.39 Approximately one in five IDP camp residents is facing constant threat of eviction.40
24. Most of the post-earthquake humanitarian services stopped in 2011 when the 18-month disaster relief mandate for most humanitarian organizations ended. A survey conducted in six IDP camps in August 2011 found dire circumstances, which are emblematic of the problems existing throughout Haiti’s camps:41

 

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Click HERE to see more information about the Housing Rights Advocacy Project (HRAP)

CEPR
Thursday, 21 March 2013 13:20

According to reports on Twitter yesterday, the United Nations independent expert on the human rights situation in Haiti, Michel Forst has resigned for “personal reasons,” even though his mandate was supposed to continue for another year. In one of his last acts, Forst’s report for the U.N. Human Rights Council was presented yesterday, recommending to Haiti and the international communitythat they “throw light” on the cause of the cholera outbreak and “respond to any compensation requests”. The cholera outbreak has killed at least 8,050 and sickened over 650,000 more.

In his report Forst notes that the “question of what caused the outbreak of the epidemic in Haiti remains a burning issue that has attracted significant public controversy.” Over the last few years, a number of scientific reports have identified U.N. troops as the source of cholera’s introduction. Forst’s report, which was issued before the U.N.’s denial of victims’ compensation claims, notes “that silence is the worst response.”

The U.N. broke their “silence” on the issue by rejecting the victims’ claims, yet they have continued to stonewall on the issue of responsibility. While Forst “deplores” the exploitation of the issue by “certain organizations…for political ends,” he recognizes the “need that victims or their families have expressed to know the truth and perhaps even to be given compensation.”

In addition to recommending shedding light on the cause of the outbreak, Forst also calls on the international community and Haitian government to, “Secure international assistance to combat the spread of the cholera epidemic.” The claim against the U.N., in addition to seeking damages, also asks for the U.N. to fund the needed infrastructure to eradicate cholera from Haiti. A 10 year, $2.2 billion eradication plan has been announced, but thus far the funding for it remains in doubt. The plan for the first two years notes that “The total cost for implementation of the Action Plan for 2013–2015 is estimated to be US$443,723,100.” So far, little more than half of that — $238 million — has been secured, most of it from existing funds.

On Sunday, the New York Times editorial board added their voice to those critical of the U.N.’s immunity claim, noting that the U.N.’s “handling of cholera is looking like a fiasco.” The Times adds:

While it insists that it has no legal liability for cholera victims, it must not duck its moral obligations. That means mobilizing doctors and money to save lives now, and making sure the eradication plan gets all the money and support it needs.

Its record so far is dubious. A U.N. appeal last year for $24 million for cholera programs ended the year only 32 percent financed, and in December, the U.N. said it would contribute $23.5 million to the new 10-year plan — about 1 percent of what is needed.

The opinion from the Times comes after the medical group Doctors Without Borders (MSF) warned last week that a “lack of funds and supplies has crippled cholera treatment programs in Haiti, leading to unnecessary deaths and increasing the risk of greater outbreaks during the upcoming rainy season.” Duncan McLean, MSF program manager in New York, added that, “Cholera now appears to be seen as a development issue to be resolved over the next 10 years, whereas the current situation still calls for an emergency medical response…The necessary resources for such a response are becoming increasingly scarce.”

And who should pay for that? In an article for The Nation, Isabeau Doucet asked Yann Libessart, MSF communications officer, who offered a blunt response: “The people who are responsible for the introduction of the disease into the country.”

While the U.N. has only funded 1 percent of the plan, Nigel Fisher, head of the U.N. Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) – whose troops caused the cholera outbreak — told Doucet that the rest of the money should come from the “private sector” or “major venture philanthropist individuals.”

Yesterday the U.N. Security Council met to discuss the Secretary General’s annual report on MINUSTAH. Some countries used the opportunity to call on the U.N. to do more to combat the cholera epidemic. The representative from Luxembourg noted that the launching of a cholera eradication plan was part of the international community’s “moral responsibility” to help those affected. The representative from Togo went even further noting that “the source…was known,” and that the “United Nations should continue to assume a “moral responsibility” to eradicate that disease.” Permanent members of the Security Council such as the U.S. remained silent on the issue.

Click HERE to see the Original Article
Click HERE to see more information about IJDH’s Cholera Accountability Project

Charanya Krishnaswami and Muneer I. Ahmad, The Washington Post
March 21, 2013  Charanya Krishnaswami is a student at Yale Law School and a member of the Transnational Development Clinic. Muneer I. Ahmad is a professor at Yale Law School, where he directs the Transnational Development Clinic. PORT-AU-PRINCE, HaitiThe mandate of the U.N. mission in Haiti includes ensuring “individual accountability for human rights abuses and redress for victims.” Yet instead of fulfilling its obligations to the roughly 600,000 Haitians affected by a cholera outbreak it caused, the United Nations is hiding, shamefully, behind a claim of immunity. By refusing to right its own wrong, the international body is violating the principles of international accountability and human rights that it purports to promote.

For all its challenges, Haiti was free of cholera for about a century before a U.N. peacekeeping force arrived from Nepal in October 2010. Although there had been an outbreak of cholera in Nepal shortly before the troops left for Haiti, the U.N. mission failed to appropriately screen the peacekeepers for the disease. This error was compounded by the United Nations’ failure to provide the peacekeeping mission adequate sanitation facilities at their base in the town of Mirebalais. As a result, cholera-infected waste leaked into a tributary to Haiti’s largest river, the Artibonite.Because many Haitians depend on the river for water, the spread of cholera was as rapid as it was deadly, killing more than 8,000 people, as of last month, and sickening hundreds of thousands of others.Cholera continues to infect 1,500 people here every week. Community health advocates told us this week that patients lack access to care and simple life-saving supplies, thanks in part to continued U.N. inaction. Victims living steps away from the U.N. base — every one of whom has lost a relative, a friend or a neighbor in the outbreak — expressed their anger at the organization and their hopes to see it brought to justice.Although a 2011 U.N. report conceded that the strains of cholera “isolated in Nepal and Haiti” were “a perfect match,” the United Nations denies responsibility for the outbreak. In November 2011, 5,000 victims of the disease, represented by the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti, a Boston-based human rights group, and the Haitian Bureau des Avocats Internationaux, filed claims for compensation under the procedures the United Nations promised to create as part of its agreement for sending peacekeepers to Haiti. After ignoring the claims for more than a year, the United Nations announced in late Februarythat they were “not receivable” because the 1946 Convention on Privileges and Immunities gave it legal immunity.A U.N. spokesman said that the outbreak resulted from “a confluence of circumstances” and was “a painful reminder of Haiti’s vulnerability in the event of a national emergency” — the January 2010 earthquake. In other words, rather than providing its victims redress, the United Nations blames them.

The U.N. failure to acknowledge the Haitians’ claims is both immoral and illegal. International law requires the organization to provide a way for parties to bring claims against peacekeeping forces. The same convention the United Nations cites as bestowing legal immunity says that the organization must “make provisions for appropriate modes of settlement” for claims that arise from its missions. Simply put, if the United Nations harms innocent bystanders, it must give those people a way to obtain justice and seek compensation for their injuries.

The United Nations appeared to honor this obligation in 2004, when it entered into a status-of-forces agreement with Haiti that, among its provisions, required the U.N. mission to set up a commission to hear claims Haitians might have against U.N. peacekeeping forces. This is the claims process that victims of the epidemic tried to use in 2011. Yet in its statement last month, the United Nations made no mention of its obligation to establish a claims commission.

This is not the first time the United Nations has ignored its duty to establish a claims commission. Although it has signed about 50 similar peacekeeping agreements since 1990,not once has the United Nations set up a commission, a World Justice Project analysisnoted last August.

This claims process is critical because the 1946 convention requires the United Nations to hold itself accountable when its peacekeepers do wrong. As then-Secretary General Kofi Annan explained in a series of reports to the U.N. General Assembly in the 1990s, the organization must be accountable when innocent parties are harmed by actions unnecessary to its mission. Leaking cholera-tainted human waste into a major waterway and consequently infecting hundreds of thousands of Haitians with a deadly disease not only undermined the U.N. mission in Haiti but also thwarted it.

Two years after cholera claimed its first victims in Haiti, the outbreak continues to ravage the Western Hemisphere’s poorest nation. By flouting its international obligations and its own promises, the United Nations has destroyed its moral credibility among Haitians. How can it purport to hold human rights abusers in Haiti accountable when it refuses to hold itself to the same standard?

Click HERE to see the Original Article
Click HERE to see the IJDH’s Cholera Accountability Project

Isabeau Doucet, The Nation
March 20, 2013

I contracted cholera by the breezy beaches of Port Salut, Haiti, while attempting to escape a burnout, a broken heart and the lingering pangs of Dengue fever. Cholera’s not a whole lot different from food poisoning, and it’s no big deal if you’ve got a clean toilet, potable water, know how to treat it and aren’t malnourished. But in Haiti, where there is no sewage system, and where access to water and sanitation is mostly privatized, cholera has been a death sentence: more than 8,000 people have died and 640,000 (and counting) made ill since the South Asian strain was imported, likely by United Nations peacekeepers from Nepal in October 2010, according to a host of scientific studies. It is now the worst cholera epidemic in modern history. In late February, the Haitian government released its long-awaited $2.2 billion, ten-year cholera elimination plan. Just the week before, the UN had rejected a legal claim filed by more than 5,000 cholera victims seeking financial compensation, an apology from the UN for gross negligence, and a commitment to build water and sanitation infrastructure in Haiti. Invoking immunity under the UN’s 1946 convention, the United Nations basically snubbed the claim as “not receivable” and has not apologized. Worse, it has committed itself to fund only 1 percent ($23.5 million) of Haiti’s cholera elimination plan; it recommends Haiti get the rest from the “private sector” or from “major venture philanthropist individuals,” according to Nigel Fisher, the new head of the UN peacekeeping mission in Haiti. In a country where nearly 80 percent of people live on less than $2 a day, privatized water and sanitation access has left more than 80 percent of the population without adequate sanitation and nearly a third without potable water. Those in tent camps and shanties who can’t pay for toilets are forced to defecate into plastic bags, which end up in the nearest canal or ravine. Those who can pay avail themselves of a free-market chaos of water and waste tanker trucks, run almost entirely by the local or international NGO private sector. A sharp rise in the price of gasoline, which could easily result from a change in the PetroCaribe deal offered by Venezuela’s late president, Hugo Chávez, could quickly deepen Haiti’s water and sanitation crisis. Haiti is one of the few countries in the world where water security has deteriorated since the Millennium Development Goals were implemented, despite a $650 million-a-year peacekeeping mission whose premise for being in a country with no war and one of the lowest homicide rates in the region is that Haiti is a “failed state.” The UN knew full well the menace cholera posed, yet the UN Development Program does not see water access as part of its “development” mandate. Jon Andrus, deputy director of the Pan American Health Organization, agrees that the privatization of Haiti’s water and sanitation has threatened its most vulnerable people, and he concedes that PAHO and its partners “have failed for decades to reverse that situation.” Still, Andrus is optimistic about the cholera elimination plan, having seen firsthand the eradication of polio, rubella and measles in some of the poorest parts of the world. However, on February 27, at the launch of the elimination plan, Médecins Sans Frontières communication officer Yann Libessart was not impressed by the lofty speeches, given that barely half ($238 million) the plan’s funding for the next two years has materialized. Cholera treatment centers that MSF passed on to the Haitian government are “degenerating” into “contamination zones,” he says. When asked who should fund the plan, Libessart is blunt: “The people who are responsible for the introduction of the disease into the country.” Emergency funds for cholera dried up in January, and most NGOs have left Haiti. The funding vacuum is squeezing DINEPA, Haiti’s water and sanitation agency, and it’s putting the jobs of two dozen qualified Haitians on the chopping block. In January, white UN sewage trucks could be seen unloading their tanks into the tailing ponds of Haiti’s first sewage treatment plant, in Morne-à-Cabrit, which opened a year and a half ago but has now been closed because of lack of funding. “It beats me up to know,” says Wilston Etienne, a DINEPA officer who oversaw the building of the treatment site, when asked why international funds to operate the plant were not forthcoming. DINEPA aims to open eighteen treatment sites, one in each urban center, but the only way Etienne foresees this being possible is by charging $4 per cubic meter of human waste. For now, Morne-à-Cabrit remains closed. Etienne shakes his head and laments, “This site should have been something Haitians could be really proud of.” Click HERE to see the IJDH’s Cholera Accountability Project
Click HERE to see the Original Article 

Jane Regan and Milo Milfort, The Final Call

March 19, 2013

PORT-AU-PRINCE (IPS)—For the first time ever, Haiti’s former dictator recently faced his accusers, answering questions about corruption and human rights abuses during his brutal 15-year regime (1971–1986).

The court of appeals hearing was part of a process that will determine if he is to be indicted on rights abuses.

“We think that this is a wonderful day for justice in Haiti,” rights attorney Nicole Phillips of the Washington-based Institute for Justice & Democracy in Haiti (IJDH), told IPS. “For the first time…and despite the efforts of his attorneys, Jean-Claude Duvalier came to court.”

The ex-dictator showed up on Feb. 28 only after first disregarding three previous orders.

The sweltering courtroom was packed with over a dozen victims of the regime and with local and foreign journalists, lawyers and representatives of human rights groups.

After his lawyers failed to convince judges to hold a closed session, for four hours the sickly looking 61-year-old, dripping with perspiration, answered judges’ questions and accusations, whispering his evasive and oft-flippant denials to the clerk who read them aloud.

A group of aging supporters of the 29-year (1957–1986) regime of “Baby Doc” and his father François “Papa Doc” Duvalier applauded the former despot’s more irreverent answers.

When Judge Jean-Joseph Lebrun asked Mr. Duvalier about murders and executions during his rule, the ex-dictator responded: “All countries have murder.”

“Were there political prisoners in Fort Dimanche?” the judge asked about the prison known as “Haiti’s Auschwitz,” where an estimated 3,000 prisoners were executed or died of hunger and disease.

“Fort Dimanche was full of all kinds of delinquents,” Mr. Duvalier replied.

At one point Mr. Duvalier even claimed, “In every domain, I have a good record” and even tried to turn the tables.

“Everything was going well when I was here. When I came back (in 2011), I found a broken and corrupt country. I should ask you, what have you done with my country?” he asked.

Human Rights Watch estimates that between 20,000 and 30,000 people were killed during the reigns of “Baby Doc” and his father. Rights groups also documented torture, rapes, forced exiles and forced disappearances during both regimes.

Among those seated in the space reserved for victims was Robert “Boby” Duval, a former Fort Dimanche prisoner.

When asked by judges, Mr. Duvalier claimed Mr. Duval had been arrested for “subversive activities” and “weapons possession,” saying the then-young businessman had been “well-treated” in prison.

“A member of his family brought him food three times a day,” Mr. Duvalier maintained.

“I didn’t have any weapons,” a visibly angry Duval later told IPS. “He told a lot of lies about me.”

“He sent me to Fort Dimanche, forcing me to drop to 90 pounds,” continued the now burly ex-soccer player, who spent 17 months in prison in 1975 and 1976, eight of them in Fort Dimanche. “They gave us 300 calories a day … They jammed 40 people into a four-by-four meter cell. Two or three people died every day.”

The judges also asked Mr. Duvalier about the accusations of corruption and embezzlement. Experts estimate “Baby Doc” stole at least $300 million.

Asked if he still had money in foreign accounts, Mr. Duvalier replied “no,” even though at least $4 million is in a frozen Swiss account.

While life in much of the country proceeded much as usual, outside the makeshift courthouse, several dozen aging Duvalier supporters dressed in red and black—the colors of the former regime—chanted “Long live Duvalier!” and “Duvalier, this is your country, do whatever you want!”

On the radios, and online, Haitians and Haiti-watchers stayed abreast of the proceedings through Tweets, photos and videos sent out by journalists, lawyers and human rights advocates.

Haitian journalist Rachèle Magloire sent out quotations every minute or so, at one point tweeting out that Mr. Duvalier said, “I am the son of a great nationalist. If it weren’t for me, the country would have fallen into civil war.” Another journalist tweeted from the room: “Duvalier supporters clamoring” while a correspondent abroad noted: “Extraordinary day in Haiti.”

The hearing ended at about 3:30 p.m. and was continued March 7, when others testified.

The session is part of an appeal by regime victims who filed a complaint against the former dictator in 2011 for crimes against humanity. In January 2012, a judge rejected the charges, citing Haiti’s 10-year statute of limitations on murder as one reason. The ruling was condemned by local and international rights groups, and by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.

The Bureau of International Lawyers, one of the groups representing the victims, noted that the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch all say the abuses under Duvalier rule constitute crimes against humanity.

“These crimes cannot be barred by any statute of limitations pursuant to international law that is binding on Haiti. As a matter of law, the Court of Appeals must grant the victims’ appeal and allow Duvalier to stand trial for both his political violence and fraud crimes,” BAI attorney Mario Joseph said in a statement following the Feb. 28 hearing. “Given the events today, we are hopeful this court will issue a fair decision.”

Two men testified before a three-judge appeals panel Thursday that they were imprisoned in ghastly conditions for months without charge under the government of former dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier.

Agronomist Alix Fils-Aime described his time at the Fort Dimanche prison in the 1970s, saying most of the people held with him were tortured and killed.

“I was able to hear people being beaten, dragged in the hallway, and I could hear women screaming as they were being forced to have sexual relations with the guard,’’ he said.

Mr. Duvalier surprised many in Haiti a week ago when he showed up in court to defend his past government following three earlier no-shows. The court had called on Duvalier to be available for further questions, but he didn’t show up March 7. His main attorney said this week that the 61-year-old had checked into a hospital for an unspecified illness. The appeals court is to hear more testimony March 14.

(Associated Press contributed to this report.)

Click HERE to see the Original Article
Click HERE to see more information about Duvalier Prosecution 

By Beverly Bell , Other Worlds
March 15, 2013

Twenty-seven years later, the unimaginable has become real. Former dictator Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier has been brought to trial for crimes against humanity.

Will justice finally arrive for the hundreds of thousands who were murdered, tortured, imprisoned, beaten, savaged, and degraded by him and his father, François “Papa Doc” Duvalier?

Camille Chalmers, director of the Haitian Platform for Alternative Development in Haiti (PAPDA), said in an interview, “Of course you can’t get a fair trial against Duvalier in this country. The political system and government we have can’t judge him. First, the culture of impunity is being reinforced as we speak. Second, Duvalier is the source of the government’s inspiration. To judge Duvalier is a bit like judging itself.”

Yet the very fact of the trial is a legal as well as moral victory for many survivors and human rights advocates, the product of many years of intensive advocacy. Lelenne Gilles, who was a youth and community organizer under Duvalier and who now serves as assistant director of programs for the National Network for the Defense of Human Rights (Le Réseau National de Défense des Droits Humains), told me, “The trial against Duvalier is historic, the first time in our history that victims are bringing a former dictator to trial. That is very important for justice. It’s very important for everyone who might ever contemplate returning the country to dictatorship. This trial makes clear that there’s a limit they cannot cross.”

Presidents-for-Life

Papa Doc came to power in a rigged election in 1957, and began establishing the most brutal regime in Haiti’s history, and one of the most brutal in Latin American history. In 1971, he transferred power to his 19-year-old son, who claimed the same title of “President-for-Life” and continued the repression and corruption.

The US’s support of both Papa and Baby Doc Duvalier was unbroken except for a brief period under John Kennedy. The support included military aid for a state that was not at war, except against its own people.

Citizens employed daily resistance, countless acts of noncompliance that usually flew below the radar. From time to time, revolutionaries attempted insurrections from within or invasions from without, only to be rounded up and killed, sometimes along with all members of their families. Periodically the underground opposition broke open into a free-speech or human-rights movement. Many of the Haitians flung into exile — who would eventually reach about a million — were also active parts of the resistance.

In 1983, two exiled Haitians, an American priest, and I started the first international human rights organization dedicated to Haiti, Washington Office on Haiti, to mobilize opposition to the dictatorship. We filled reports and articles with stories of Duvalier’s abuses; pressured the administration along with the US Congressional Black Caucus; and did whatever we could to raise attention, outrage, and action. The vicious regime’s reach was long; the executions and torture filled my own waking days and dreaming nights for years.

The straw that broke the camel’s back came when the Tonton Macoutes, the despot’s personal henchmen, gunned down three youth in the town of Gonaïves in late 1985. The latent fury and clandestine organizing overflowed into a crashing torrent of rebellion, with strikes and daily protests and refusal to be quieted or governed. The regime survived by a mere 10 weeks.

When, during those weeks, the widespread resistance made it clear that the autocracy was doomed, the US finally pulled its support. Wanting to preempt the ascendance of a left-wing government, the US flew Duvalier to France aboard one of its own airplanes on February 7, 1986, and then installed a military junta the next day. Haiti continued to be what people called “Duvalierism without Duvalier,” with illegal regimes and military juntas, all US-supported, following one after the other. At last, in 1990, Haiti had its first democratic elections.

On January 16, 2011, Duvalier returned to Haiti, likely to try to liberate $6 million in stolen assets from his frozen bank account in Switzerland. He appeared to have been trying to beat a Swiss law, dubbed the “Duvalier law,” which was to go into effect on February 1, making it easier for Switzerland to seize the funds. Instead, three days later, the Préval government charged him with corruption and embezzlement and placed him under house arrest. Duvalier defied his detention to zip around town in a luxury automobile and eat at elegant restaurants high in the hills.

On Trial, If Not Actually In Court

The government of Michel Martelly, which took power through a fraudulent election in May 2011, is closely allied to Duvalier in ideology and personnel. A number of former Duvalier officials have been recycled into Martelly’s reign, and Duvalier’s own son serves as a Martelly advisor. The government even granted Duvalier a diplomatic passport.

The government stopped pursuing the case, and Martelly even talked about granting Duvalier amnesty. The chief prosecutor recommended that all charges be dropped. In 2012, another judge ruled that Duvalier could not be prosecuted for crimes against humanity because the statute of limitation had expired under Haitian law, though he could still be tried for embezzlement. The survivors appealed the dismissal to the appellate court on the basis that under international law, to which Haiti is bound, crimes against humanity like kidnapping, torture and murder do not have statutes of limitation. The appellate court is currently hearing the argument of the victims, who are represented by the International Lawyers’ Office (BAI by its French acronym) and the law firm of Jean-Joseph Exumé.

Duvalier failed to appear for the first three hearings, held every Thursday. When he was threatened with arrest, he showed up to testify on February 28. He claimed that “I have a positive record and this is in all areas,” and that “Murders exist in all countries.” He said that Fort Dimanche – Haiti’s most notorious death chamber, the site of the torture and near-death of many of those bringing charges – had been filled with “delinquents” and “drug dealers.”

Duvalier was subsequently struck with the epidemic that affects former dictators when they are brought to trial, and claimed he was hospitalized. Thus he was absent during the two hearings when survivors took the stand.

Among the first to testify, among the 30 or so who brought charges, was soccer coach Robert (Bobby) Duval. We had worked closely together toward the restoration of democracy when he was in exile, during the first coup d’état against President Jean-Bertrand Aristide (1991–94). Bobby is a font of anger and courage. The founder of the League of Former Haitian Political Prisoners, he carries his imprisonment with him like a scar. Bobby testified about his seventeen months at Fort Dimanche and the National Penitentiary during 1976 and 1977. He was never charged with a crime or brought to trial, nor ever told why he had been arrested. He told the court, “I never knew why I was of interest to the regime.”

During his eight months at Fort Dimanche, Bobby estimated that he saw or heard 180 corpses being taken away, killed either through execution, torture, or starvation. The same woven banana-leaf mats on which the victims had slept became their burial shroud. The bodies were hauled off in a wooden cart and dropped into a hole in the ground behind the prison. Each time, other prisoners sang a funeral dirge from their cells.

Normally a bear of a man, Bobby estimated that he lost 90 pounds during his detention. When he was transferred to another jail, he said, he walked past a mirror and didn’t realize that the person he saw was himself until after the fact. He was continually threatened with torture but for some reason never was.

Bobby was on the verge of death from starvation and illness when Jimmy Carter was elected president of the US. Though Carter’s administration continued supporting Duvalier, still he sent a commission to Haiti in February of 1977 to demand it free 13 political prisoners. Ten of the 13 were already dead. While being sent to Fort Dimanche was usually a death sentence, with most prisoners ending up in that hole in the ground, Bobby and the two others made it out alive.

During Bobby’s and others’ testimony, the judges were often distracted, asking questions that had already been answered and, at times, intervening more to demand respect and deference than to probe the case. They appeared highly interested in hurrying through their Thursdays in the hot, crowded chamber. When Bobby began naming other prisoners who had been in the cell with him, a judge told him he was going into too much detail. The same judge asked another witness, Alix Fils-Aimé, after about thirty minutes of testimony, if he couldn’t “just give a summary” of his abuse and imprisonment because “otherwise we’ll be here all day.”

Some human rights lawyers at the proceedings reported feeling that the judges were respectful and engaged with certain witnesses. Some of the judges’ questions, such as “Did you ever see anyone tortured to death?” elicited key testimony.

The Public Minister, who works with the prosecution supposedly for the public good, appeared sympathetic to Duvalier when he testified, helping him make excuses. In one instance, she asked Duvalier if he believed he were mature enough, at 19, to rule a country. He responded that he hadn’t felt he had the strength, and that he had told his father no.

One of Duvalier’s lawyers was the son of the despot’s minister of justice. The defense team created a circus act, trying to disrupt the proceedings and intimidate witnesses by shouting at the opposing team, and even the judges. Their points were usually absurd. They asked Bobby such questions as whether he had gone tovisit Duvalier to offer thanks for his release, whether he was part of a group of people setting people on fire “for their political convictions” after Duvalier’s departure, and whether he was “accusing the Haitian police and government of being controlled by the US State Department.” The defense asked plaintiff Fils-Aimé if he had been growing marijuana when he was arrested. A lawyer asked plaintiff Nicole Magloire if, when she said she was opposed to Duvalier’s anti-communist law, “she was above the laws of the republic, which were an assertion of the power of the state.” He asked, furthermore, if she had been having “intimate relations” with an army commander.

An order from the court will likely come out in the next several weeks. Whoever wins, the decision will surely be appealed.

Justice has long been deferred. Let us hope it is not denied.

Click HERE to see the Original Article
Click HERE to see more information about Duvalier Prosecution

Trinidad Express Newspaper
March 13, 2013

IT was bad enough for the United Nations to bring cholera into earthquake-stricken Haiti via its troops. But to give itself legal immunity against victims’ claims for damages is simply outrageous.

In just one sentence, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon has severely damaged the confidence that the people of Haiti has reposed in the UN ever since the Duvalier dictatorship fell, making room for a greater UN presence in this Caribbean country.

We therefore share the outrage expressed by former prime minister of Jamaica, Percival Patterson who, having served as Caricom’s special adviser in Haiti in the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake, would know Haiti’s pain first-hand.

The UN’s reputation as a well-meaning, honest broker to the world now stands to be savaged by this decision to refuse compensation to the 5,000 Haitian claimants for the cholera epidemic which has been scientifically traced to infection from Nepalese UN peacekeepers who were brought in following the earthquake.

The compensation claim, filed by the Boston-based Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti (IJDH), had seemed open and shut until Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon delivered the shock position that the UN was invoking “legal immunity” in denying liability and refusing compensation.

In one stroke, the United Nations, champion of democracy the world over, had revealed itself as capable of arbitrary, autocratic and unjust decision-making as those it often condemns. This UN verdict effectively tells Haiti that it must not expect justice from the very agency in which it had reposed its trust for assistance and relief.

By denying responsibility in this matter, the UN has now joined the list of those who will not be held accountable for its misdeeds in Haiti.

This is not merely a legal matter; it is a moral issue. For, if the UN, above all, will not take responsibility for its failures in Haiti—in this case the failure to adequately screen its peacekeepers, detect disease and respond to a deadly health crisis—who will? Having endured a cholera epidemic which killed 8,000 people, sickened a further 6,000 and counting, the UN’s invoking of immunity amounts to a declaration that Haitians should expect no more than to lick their wounds and accept their fate when others do them wrong.

We, the members of the Caricom family, must not accept this. In every forum, we must raise our voices and insist on being heard.

To be blunt, Caricom has achieved very little in Haiti of which it can be proud. After the initial outpouring of generosity by our people, Caribbean governments have proved themselves little better than the rest of the world in providing meaningful and transformational assistance.

With the reconstruction plan all but collapsed, international interests have largely slunk away, leaving Haitians to paddle their own canoes. In the face of this latest absurdity, however, the Caricom region must unite for Haiti again, and rally international support in resisting this extraordinarily perverse UN determination.

Click HERE to see the Original Article
Click HERE to see more information about IJDH’s Cholera Accountability Project

Rasna Warah,  Daily Nation
March 17th, 2013

It is a scandal beyond belief. After starting a cholera epidemic in Haiti in 2010, which has so far claimed more than 8,000 lives, the United Nations has not only denied responsibility, but is using its “diplomatic immunity” status to deny the victims’ families compensation.

To add insult to injury, the UN has launched a $2 billion appeal to fight the very epidemic that it introduced to Haiti in the first place.

Reports indicate that it began in 2010 when the UN sent Nepalese peacekeepers to Haiti without first screening them for cholera and other diseases.

Haiti was still recovering from a massive earthquake when the infected soldiers dumped sewage into a river system used by the local people.

More than 647,000 people have since been infected with cholera, and the numbers keep growing – this in a country that had not seen a single case of cholera for over a century.

According to journalist Jonathan Katz who has documented the cholera crisis in Haiti in his book The Big Truck That Went By, the UN tried to cover up the cause of the epidemic by hindering the work of public health investigators.

However, scientists eventually identified the particular strain of cholera infecting people in Haiti as the same one that was circulating in Nepal then.

The families of the victims claimed compensation from the UN. Last month the UN stated that their demands were “not receivable” and that the UN enjoyed legal immunity.

Critics say that UN immunity often translates into impunity. Since it was established, the UN has used “diplomatic immunity” to protect itself from being sued for all manner of atrocities that it has committed around the world.

Diplomatic immunity means that the UN or its staff members cannot be charged for negligence, theft, fraud, rape, or even murder unless the UN Secretary-General allows for the lifting of immunity in individual cases, which rarely happens.

No one, for instance, has been charged for the “Oil-for-Food” scandal in Iraq when more than $10 billion disappeared into the personal accounts of Saddam Hussein, politicians (some from countries represented at the UN Security Council) and UN staff members.

“If a multinational company behaved the way the UN did in Haiti, it would be sued for stratospheric amounts of money,” wrote Armin Rosen in The Atlantic.

“And that’s just for starters: Were Unilever or Coca Cola responsible for a cholera outbreak that killed 8,000 people and infected 640,000 or more and subsequently covering up its employees’ failure to adhere to basic sanitation standards, it is likely that their executives would have difficulty visiting countries claiming universal legal jurisdiction. They would have to contend with Interpol red notices, along with the occasional cream pie attack.”

The UN and its spin-doctors have always denied wrongdoing, even when it has led to loss of life.

The most recent case is that of Zimbabwe where the UN denied that a cholera epidemic was underway in 2008, even while thousands of children were dying from the disease.

The staffer who alerted the UN about the epidemic was fired apparently because senior UN officials did not want to upset President Robert Mugabe with the bad news.

However, while it is difficult to directly link the UN to loss of life in Zimbabwe, in Haiti’s case, the link couldn’t be more stark.

And yet, even in an open-and-shut case such as this, the UN has failed to be accountable – let alone apologize – to the very people it was supposed to assist. On the contrary, it is asking taxpayers to clean up the mess it created.

Click HERE to see the Original Article
Click HERE to see more information about IJDH’s Cholera Accountability Project

The New York Times
March 17, 2013

The aid group Doctors Without Borders said last Tuesday that the cholera crisis in Haiti was getting worse, for the most unnecessary and appalling of reasons: a lack of money and basic medical supplies.

 The disease has killed 8,000 people and sickened 649,000 since October 2010. International efforts to defeat the epidemic include a 10-year, $2.2 billion plan for major investments in clean water, sanitation and medical infrastructure. But that is a project for the future, one that isn’t even funded yet. Doctors Without Borders says people are dying now, needlessly, because attention and money are running out. Aid groups are leaving. Staff members at some treatment centers haven’t been paid in months, equipment is wearing out, and sanitary precautions are being abandoned. The death rate has reached an intolerably high 4 percent in some places, the group said. And the rainy season is about to make things much more difficult.

The dreadful backdrop to this emergency is an abdication of responsibility by organizations that have pledged to help Haiti, particularly the United Nations. The U.N. said last month that it would not pay financial compensation for the epidemic’s victims, claiming immunity. This is despite overwhelming evidence that the U.N. introduced the disease, which was unknown in Haiti until it suddenly appeared near a base where U.N. peacekeepers had let sewage spill into a river.

Though the U.N. has done much good in Haiti since the 2010 earthquake, its handling of cholera is looking like a fiasco. While it insists that it has no legal liability for cholera victims, it must not duck its moral obligations. That means mobilizing doctors and money to save lives now, and making sure the eradication plan gets all the money and support it needs.

Its record so far is dubious. A U.N. appeal last year for $24 million for cholera programs ended the year only 32 percent financed, and in December, the U.N. said it would contribute $23.5 million to the new 10-year plan — about 1 percent of what is needed.

Click HERE to see the Original Article
Click HERE to see more information about IJDH’s Cholera Accountability Project

United Nations     Nations Unies
Office of the Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator in Haiti
PRESS RELEASE

The humanitarian community concerned about growing incidents of forced evictions

Port-au-Prince, 08 March 2013. The United Nations Humanitarian Coordinator (HC) a.i. in Haiti, Mr. Ross Mountain, has expressed the grave concern of the humanitarian community in country regarding the recent incidents of forced evictions of internally displaced persons (IDPs) from camps in Port-au-Prince.

On 2 March, Mr. Mountain visited the Acra 2 IDP camp in Port-au-Prince to assess issues surrounding camps at risk of forced eviction.

This visit followed evictions of about 1,000 displaced families in camps Acra 1 and 2 (Petion-ville) and Gaston Margron (Carrefour) in metropolitan Port-au-Prince on 17 February 2013. Following the camp visit, HC Mountain met with the Minister of Human Rights and the Fight against Extreme Poverty, Mrs. Rose Anne Auguste to discuss the issue of forced evictions in IDP camps.

The Minister stated that a judicial inquiry was ongoing and security presence was being strengthened around camps at risk. She pointed out that President Martelly had on several occasions condemned forced evictions and that the Government-designed 16/6 programme for camp closure remains the way forward. The 16/6 project supports the return and resettlement of displaced persons living in camps, as well as the rehabilitation of the neighborhoods affected by displacement.

Mr. Mountain emphasized the shared views of the UN and the Haitian government on forced evictions, and stressed that “these families have suffered intimidation, physical violence and the destruction of their shelters, including through arson”. While recognizing the right of owners to enjoy their property, Mountain recalled that, the practice of forced eviction often results in violations of human rights such as the right to life and security of the individual.

Crimes were committed during the recent forced evictions which constitute a violation of these basic human rights. Haitian authorities have the responsibility to promote and protect the rights of all their citizens, including IDPs. Mountain stressed that relocation and resettlement of IDPs needed to take account of procedural safeguards foreseen in international and national laws such as due notice, informed consent and compensatory measures.

Today, a little less than 350,000 displaced people live in 450 camps, most of them unable to find a return solution and without access to appropriate services. The humanitarian community estimates that more than 66,000 internally displaced persons (in 150 camps) have been victims of forced evictions since July 2010. More than 73,000 people living in 87 camps (20 per cent of the total displaced population) are facing threats of eviction in 2013. A forced eviction is the permanent or temporary removal against their will of individuals, families or communities from the homes or land they occupy, without the provision of access to appropriate forms of legal or other protection.

For further information, please contact:
George Ngwa Anuongong, Chief, Communications section, ngwaanuongong@un.org, Tel. (509) 3702 5192
Guillaume Schneiter, Reporting Officer, schneiterg@un.org, Tel. (509) 3702 5758
Rachelle Elien, Public Information Officer, elien@un.org, Tel. (509) 3702 5177

OCHA humanitarian bulletins are available at haiti.humanitarianresponse.info | www.unocha.org | www.reliefweb.int

Click HERE to see the PDF Version
Click HERE to see more information about IJDH’s Housing Rights Advocacy Project (HRAP)

By EVENS SANON, Associated Press
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti March 14, 2013 (AP)

Testimony in the high-profile case of former Haitian dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier resumed Thursday, with another alleged victim describing abuses she says were committed under his rule.

Dr. Nicole Magloire told an appellate court about the broad influence wielded by the former leader known as “Baby Doc,” and the alleged violations associated with his 15-year government.

Duvalier “was declared supreme leader of all the armed forces in the country,” said Magloire, an opposition leader who fled into exile during that era. “He was in charge of the National Palace. He was in charge of the army. He was in charge of the country.”

Magloire is the third person this month to testify about alleged abuses under Duvalier, a playboy strongman who inherited power from his father Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier and ruled Haiti from 1971–1986 with the help of the Tonton Macoutes private militia.

Last week, two other people described ghastly prison conditions they said they endured while locked up for months in a prison notorious for torture.

Magloire spent five days behind bars after being arrested by government of the younger Duvalier, the former “president for life” known as “Baby Doc.”

Defense attorney Fritzo Canton asked her Thursday if the arrest might have been a mistake. “If I was arrested by mistake, I was imprisoned by mistake and forced into exile by mistake,” Magloire said.

Duvalier was charged with human rights abuses and embezzlement in 2011 after his surprise return to Haiti following 25 years in exile. His attorneys say he is innocent on both counts.

A lower court threw out the human rights charges and said Duvalier should face charges only for the alleged financial crimes.

The court of appeals is now considering whether to reinstate the rights abuse charges, and is looking at an appeal by Duvalier’s legal team to drop the embezzlement charges as well.

The case could also go to a trial.

Duvalier recently made a surprise appearance in court, after failing to honor three earlier orders to appear, and testified that Haiti was better off under his watch.

International and local human rights groups hailed Duvalier’s day-long testimony a small triumph for a judiciary long plagued with dysfunction and corruption.

The 61-year-old Duvalier suddenly checked into an unspecified hospital following his court appearance, his attorney Reynold Georges said. The attorney said Thursday that Duvalier had since left the hospital, but declined to say when.

The court will hear more testimony from alleged victims next week.

Click HERE to see the Original Article
Click HERE to see more information about Duvalier Prosecution

Alok Pokharel, Boston Haitian Reporter
Mar. 14, 2013

On March 23, 2013, the Boston Haiti community will have an opportunity to join and amplify the fight for justice for Haiti’s cholera victims by participating in an event organized by the Boston-based Institute for Justice & Democracy in Haiti (IJDH) from 5–7 p.m. at Mildred Avenue Middle School, 5 Mildred Avenue in Mattapan.

The event will screen the award-winning film ‘Baseball in the Time of Cholera,’ followed by a panel discussion moderated by Charlot Lucien, a Haitian journalist, professor and artist. The panel will feature a diverse range of community leaders: Marie St. Fleur, Esq., Boston Mayor Thomas Menino’s Chief of Advocacy and Strategic Investments; State Rep. Linda Dorcena Forry; Jean Ford Figaro, M.D., Health Education Coordinator at Boston Medical Center; and Brian Concannon, Jr. Esq., Director of IJDH.

‘Baseball in the Time of Cholera’ portrays the personal impact of cholera on a young boy’s life and Haitians’ struggle for justice at the United Nations (UN). The UN-introduced cholera has gravely harmed life of many Haitians, already killing more than 8,000 and sickening over 646,000 — more than 6 percent of the nation’s population. The event brings Haitian stakeholders and community members together with a platform to discuss the ongoing cholera epidemic and the route to justice for the cholera victims, who have been left unheeded and denied access to justice.

The need to stand up and join the growing mobilization for cholera victims is particularly urgent as the victims’ right to justice was recently shattered when the UN tersely dismissed claims for reparations. In November 2011, IJDH and its Haitian affiliate, the Bureau des Avocats Internationaux (BAI) filed claims on behalf of 5,000 Haitian cholera victims seeking life-saving water and sanitation to avert the ongoing cholera crisis, compensation for victims, and a public apology from the UN.

After 15 months of delay with an additional 3000 deaths and illness to hundred thousands, the UN simply replied that the claims are “not receivable” because they require a review of UN policy and political matters. Overwhelming evidence and extensive studies have supported that cholera outbreak is directly attributable to the UN’s negligent to adequately screen troops for cholera prior to their deployment to Haiti and to it’s recklessness dumping human feces into central river.

Section 29 of the UN’s privileges and immunities convention, cited by the UN in its dismissal, compels it to settle claims of the cholera victims. The UN’s agreement with the government of the Haiti also furthers this obligation to hear victim’s claims for injury, illness or death from cholera. By dismissing these claims, the UN is completely denying justice to those who have suffered at its hands. The UN has compensated victims for its wrongdoing in Kosovo and in Congo in the past. The UN’s charter, binding law to the UN, mandates the UN to respect equal rights of all; but the UN’s current decision implies its double standard.

Providing justice for some while evading responsibility in Haiti is not justifiable on legal or moral grounds. Not only is the UN is rejecting the victims’ voice, but it is also ignoring voices around the world that have stood in solidarity with Haitians. Over 28,000 individuals representing different nations have signed a petition to the UN “…to help Haitians stamp out killer cholera for good’. Former President of the United States and the UN’s Special Envoy for Haiti, Bill Clinton, publicly acknowledged the UN’s role in causing cholera.

In July, 2012, 104 U.S. Congress members, including Representatives Stephen Lynch, Michael E. Capuano and Ed Markey from Massachusetts, urged the UN to “take immediate action” on cholera, stating that “A failure to act will not only lead to countless more deaths: it will undermine the crucial effort to reconstruct Haiti…” As they expressed, the UN’s failure to act has jeopardized its entire mission in Haiti and cholera is still killing Haitians year-by-year.

Cholera remains as a threat to the life of most Haitians and a key challenge to the government of Haiti. Victims need immediate attention from the government of Haiti and the international community, including Haitian community in the U.S., to speak out against the UN’s injustice. Standing up against the UN has emerged to be an outmost necessity to guarantee victims justice and to protect Haitian from future death and sickness. It is only possible if every stakeholder decides to join the fight against the UN. We urge every Haitian in Boston and stakeholders to create momentum in pushing the UN to accept its liabilities and the film event on March 23 promises to be an entry.

Alok Pokharel is legal fellow at Institute for Justice & Democracy in Haiti (IJDH), an organization based on Dorchester Avenue in South Boston.

 
Click HERE to see more information about IJDH’s Cholera Accountability Project
Click HERE to see the Original Article 

 

<Transcript of: March 7 2013 IJDH call on Duvalier with Staff Attorney Nicole Phillips>

Min 0:00 – 4:59

Brian: [inaudible] …legitimacy in Haiti, they represent some of the victims who filed complaints of political violence and they appealed the dismissal of political violence crimes, and so what we’re now doing in the appeals court process that is deciding whether those political violence crimes were correctly tried and for people more familiar with the English and American legal systems this is a little strange because they’re actually taking victim testimony and defendant testimony at an appeals court hearing which you can do in the United States, but in this case the appeals court in Haiti have fairly broad powers, they can almost re-do the trials court’s work. It looks like that’s what the trial court’s doing is to, really look at the factual basis underlying the claims to see if there’s an issue for trial. And with that, I’ll pass it on to Nicole with a quick introduction.  Nicole is an adjunct professor at the university of San Francisco school of law and for the last three years she’s been a lawyer with the Bureau des Advocates International, she has a long experience of labor and human rights work, and for IJDH she leads most of our international litigation including the American Commission on Human Rights and the UN Human Rights Counsel. Since January she’s been based in Haiti and she’s been following the hearings at the at the appeals court. I’ll let Nicole take it from here and tell us what’s been happening on the ground.

Nicole: Okay great, thank you Brian. I am going to– I’m sorry I just called in by cell phone hopefully you all will be able to hear me now. For the last month the hearings have really heated up, and as Brian mentioned the case is in the appeals court right now. Not a lot has happened over the last year but in the last few weeks the court has started having hearings again and the main focus has been to get Jean-Claude Duvalier in to testify.  It took three weeks to compel him to testify. His lawyers argued very strenuously against it although they didn’t have very good legal arguments about why he shouldn’t be allowed to testify. Instead their tactics were to divert attention to other things, make legal arguments that had nothing to do with whether or not Duvalier should testify.  They also attacked the victims’ lawyer’s ability to be at the hearing, they wanted to exclude our lawyers of course. Our victims’ lawyers make up about 3 different law offices that include the BAI; it’s a really impressive legal team that’s led by a former minister of justice, as well as Mario Joseph and four other BAI lawyers. The court ordered Duvalier to appear and finally last week he did.  Duvalier had filed an initial interlocutory appeal with the Supreme Court to block his testimony, even though there was actually no real order from the court that was appealable so their appeal was improper. Luckily the court didn’t buy it so he testified last week – last Thursday – the court room was packed, there was well over 100 people, standing room only, a lot of panelists, as well as victims. There were also interestingly a lot of monitors at the hearing, there was somebody from the US embassy,  amnesty international, human rights watch, as well as the UN, the High Commissioner for Human Rights that work through the Minustah human rights office, and many others from different embassy’s, et cetera.  So it was a packed court room, Duvalier did appear.  He was asked probably about a dozen or so questions, and really didn’t give a lot of information; he spoke very softly…

Min 5:00 – 9:59

(Nicole) …he sat down and spoke to a clerk that wrote down all of his answers and then read them back to the court.  He was so weakened that he wasn’t even able to speak out, which is quite contrary to the victims who spoke today. But I’ll get to that in a second. The judges asked very good questions about his knowledge about Fort Dimanche, what was happening in Fort Dimanche, his control of police, but he really didn’t answer any of the questions with any specificity, he was really basic in all of his answers.  Unlike the common law system where he’d be asked follow up questions, the court left it at however he answered. On the other hand though, we really walked away from that day feeling that Duvalier evaded the questions so you almost didn’t need a follow up.  It was quite clear that he was not in good faith about giving his answers.

The most interesting question in last week’s hearing with Duvalier was asked by his own lawyer, Renald George, who is a very intelligent lawyer who asked whether or not he had a copy of 1976 report from the US embassy about human rights abuses that was released at the same time as the Amnesty International report on the same subject. Duvalier responded that he had been at a meeting in Washington where he was meeting other international governments where they talked about how NGO’s, rather than promoting human rights in the country, were very de-stabilizing to the governments.  That appeared to be a direct attack to Amnesty International, and it was interesting that Duvalier’s lawyer asked about the US government. I spoke with one of the victims, Bobby Duval, afterwards and he thought that Duvalier’s testimony that day was geared towards the US government, saying you gave me cart blanche, supported me, put me in office, I just did what I was able to do.  His answers and others were reminders to the US government, who was sitting in the court room. So that’s an important thing also because we’ve mentioned in interviews, Brian and me and others, that the US government has not yet spoken up about the Duvalier prosecution. You know they influence Haitian politics, the government and the economy, and many other areas.

So that was Duvalier’s testimony last week, this week was the testimony of the victims.  There are about 6 victims that are signed up to speak. Only two testified today.  They each were on the stand for almost two hours, they stood – unlike Duvalier who didn’t stand – they stood and spoke loudly enough for everyone in the court room to hear.  Jean-Claude Duvalier was not there today, we knew he wasn’t going to be there today but there was a press release that came out today that said he was sick in the hospital, but we knew he wasn’t going to be there – that he was not ordered to be there today because his testimony was last week.

The 6th victim that testified was Alix Fils Aimé, and he used to be a deputy in Petionville. He went – was in prison for about 18 months and in the middle of that he was in Fort Dimanche, which as many of you know is known for its horrible prison abuses, torture, and conditions. So, he talked about being kidnapped and arrested, and how he was mostly in solitary confinement in the jail, and living conditions…

 Min 10:00 – 14:59

(Nicole)… he had a one and a half meters by one and a half meter cell so he was barely able to lie down, he was barely able to lay down and the cell had excrement, urine, blood, mosquitoes everywhere and he wore only his underwear and that was it. They gave him a little bowl of food through a little iron door, which was his only real human contact except he was able to hear torture happening around him in the other cells. When he was in Fort Dimanche for those 46 days that he was there in 1977, that was one of the questions from the judge was whether he saw people being tortured to death. His response was that he saw prisoners naked with their legs apart, beaten on their buttocks so badly that they started defecating. He didn’t mention if they died or not but that was his answer that question. The second witness was Bobby Duval, which you may know.  He spent some time in Canada, he was a famous soccer player here in Haiti, a celebrity and has a nonprofit now, which I think has really been an icon for the victims group for Duvalier. He was targeted because of the time he spent abroad.  He talked more about the prison conditions – he spent some of his time in Fort Dimanche.  He talked about how he was given about one bowl of cornmeal a day which he thinks is about 300 calories, which is how most of them lost pounds quickly and started to die. In the 8 months he was in Fort Dimanche, he counted 180 people die, and that when people died – the prisoners were kept in in blocks of cells about 20 feet wide with 40 people per cell, and that when somebody would die they would knock on the door – the iron door of the cell so everyone could hear and the guards would come by and take the body out and throw it into a big hole near the prison.

One of the questions he was asked by Duvalier’s lawyer was ‘if you were in solitary confinement, how did you know how many people were dying?’  His answer was, “While I was in Fort Dimanche I wasn’t in solitary confinement, we were kept in cells and that we had a system – and we counted about three people a week who would die, and each cell was in charge of counting on a weekly basis how many people died.”  The last thing that he said was – and then I’ll switch over to questions – was that he was pretty –

Caller A: I’m sorry to interrupt, this is [inaudible] from Jamaica, the connection is not very clear if you could speak a little — there is a lot of noise in the background, so if you could speak a little clearer please.

Nicole: Sure, yeah, thanks for letting me know, if folks could put their phones on mute that would be great.  I think we have over 30 – about 40 people on the line, is this better now, can you hear me?

Caller A: Hello?

Nicole: Hi, can you hear me – is this any better?

Caller B: I think your voice is very clear, people just need to mute their phones.

Nicole: Okay, so if we could mute phones right now that would be great.

Caller B: It’s a lot better now.

Nicole: Okay so what Duval said was that he was freed because in 1976 President Jimmy Carter came into office in the United States, that he cared about human rights and so he sent an ambassador to Haiti with a list of 13 names in prisons.  The US government at that time started putting…

Min 15:00 – 19:59

(Nicole) …pressure on the Haitian government.  His name was on that list of 13 people but that only 3 people were alive still of the 13 people that were on that list. He was very lucky. So he was transferred in January 1977 to a different facility where he was cared for. He apparently lost weight, he only weighed only about 120 or so pounds, and he’s a big guy, definitely well over 6 foot tall, and he was cared for back to health but he really almost died.  Both these witnesses themselves did not experience torture — beatings I should say, and both are very, very grateful that they didn’t, but witnessed the torture and beating of others, and endured the prison conditions.

I spoke to Mario right after the hearing and I asked him what he thought of the hearing. All of our lawyers seem really pleased with how it went.  He is very optimistic that this court– this appeals court will rule in our favor on the appeal– on the victims appeal, and so what that means is that it could go back down to the trial court, overruling of trial court order, and there would be a trial on Jean-Claude Duvalier, not just on the financial crime but also for the political violence crimes. The only sticking part of course is that Duvalier will have another chance, both sides will have another chance, to appeal the Supreme Court, I think it’s quite likely that Duvalier’s lawyers will appeal to the Supreme Court. That would be a whole new battle and a whole new set of judges and so who knows what will happen! In terms of time length, it looks like there will be one, if not two more hearings where we will listen to victim’s testimonies and there might be another hearing after that with some legal arguments.  Mario thinks that this evidence will be enough to sustain that there were prison and crimes against humanity, and therefore is appropriate to have a trial on these crimes, which is a huge victory. I’ll leave it there for now, and I think it would be great to open it up to questions.

Caller C: are we going to get a transcript of what you said? Because its– I’m sorry, I missed half of it.

Nicole: I’m not sure, I think somebody is recording this, but I’m not positive I’m sorry, I don’t know.

Hannah: Yes, we should be able to send a transcript.

Caller C: Alright, thank you.

Caller D: Did you say, I’m trying to clarify if you said that Duvalier said that the US government put him there and he just was doing what he could?

Nicole: No, he did not say that. It was the implication, what he said is that he had a meeting with the US government where they talked about the interference of NGO’s.

Caller D: Okay.

Pooja: Hey Nicole, this is Pooja, I have a couple of questions. How are you? Wonderful information – a very exciting time. My first question is about the status of the financial crimes case. Is there any movement of that in Haiti? And also, I remember that a couple of years back when he came to Haiti I remember that that was speculation that he had done so to avoid getting his assets in Switzerland confiscated, do you know what the status of that is? So that’s the first question. And then the second question – it’s basically about the process going forward in terms of, you know, when you guys would expect the appeals court to issue a ruling, all things considered – yeah, that would basically be it, thanks Nicole.

Nicole: Sure, thanks Pooja.

Min 20:00 – 24:59

(Nicole) …So for the financial crimes, that case I think has been stalled, but to my knowledge there hasn’t been a lot of movement on that case. I think there’s some work and preparation of evidence but in the judiciary there hasn’t been movement to my knowledge. In terms of his return back to Haiti and the millions of dollars he has in a Swiss bank account, I have not heard an update on that. the last I heard was that the money was still being held and of course we don’t know exactly why Duvalier came back to Haiti As of February 1, 2011 – about a week before he came to Haiti, under Swiss law, the burden of proof was still on the government to prove that the money in these bank accounts were not ill-gotten gains, if there was an allegation of that,  whereas under – that was before February 1st, right after February 1st the presumption shifted to the alleged dictator that they were not ill-gotten gains.  Because of the shift in burden of proof, he wanted to come into Haiti, spend a few days here, he said he would arrive and be here only for three days, and that he was going to come into Haiti within the mix of elections and political instability and that he wouldn’t be arrested, so he thought, and go back to Geneva and say ‘I was there, they didn’t arrest me, and therefore I get to take the money out of the Swiss bank account.’  But instead he didn’t. I don’t know if Brian is on the phone – if he as any other information on that.

Brian: This is Brian; I have not heard anything of the disposition of the money. My guess is that the Haitian government was able to take it, because I think that on February 1st 2011, he might have lost any opportunity he had to get it but I can’t confirm that the Haitian government did in fact do what it necessary to get the money back.

Nicole: Then in terms of your third question, Pooja, about how long this is going to take – it’s hard to know. Of course, they haven’t really said yet but I think Mario thinks it’s going to happen pretty soon, potentially within the next few weeks, and I don’t know when the order will be released out of the appeal court.

Pooja: Great, thanks.

Connor Bohan: Nicole, this is Connor Bohan, first of all, thanks for all your work, this is horrifying and exciting all at the same time. I’m wondering how open or accessible these hearings are, I imagine it is hard to get a seat in the court room.  Are they either televised or recorded and then available afterwards?

Nicole: Yes, the hearings are open to the press. There are a lot of both radio and TV journalists and newspaper journalists that are there.  Probably at least 80–90% are Haitian which is great to know that this is directly on Haitian TV and on Haitian radio.  I don’t see any kind of official recording but the court itself is making a written record but I don’t know how that will be available down the road. It’s a good question though, because particularly the testimony of Duvalier and the testimony of the hearing is something that a lot of people should be able to see in their entirety and it’s nice to have copies of that but I don’t know how they’d get disseminated necessarily.

Connor Bohan: Okay, thanks.

Mike: I have a related question – this is Mike.  Thanks again of course for all the wonderful work you guys are doing.  I’m wondering whether the legal documents submitted by both sides are available to the public and related to that, will any new evidence be able to be submitted in the event of a trial down the road?

Min 25:00 – 29:59

Nicole: We would be likely be submitting new evidence in a trial so that will be an exciting time if we get there. In terms of the legal piece, we have not – because a lot of the legal arguments have not been made yet, we have not yet made our brief available to the public.  Other than the appeal to the Supreme Court, I have not seen any brief coming out of Duvalier’s lawyers.  We have been able to obtain an amazing brief that was coordinated through the Center for Justice and Accountability based in San Francisco that have provide assistance to Haiti victims in prior cases, they were able to make a brief on crimes against humanity and clarify those issues, that there is no statute of limitations or limits on these crimes based on customary international law. We got that brief, we have our own brief, and we may have another brief so that at some point that might become public but now they’re not.  A lot of these arguments are in reports by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, so if you go on our website IJDH.org under Duvalier projects, you’ll find those reports and those really summarize the legal arguments quite well.

Mike: Thanks.

Caller E: Nicole, can you – I mean it’s in its early days, I know, but can you summarize what the effect you think this will being having on the Haitian public politically, I mean what kind of – you say the court room has a lot of Haitian journalists so what kind of effect is the reporting having?

Nicole: Hi, you ask a great question, and it’s a little hard to know right now. I think one of the things I heard is that a lot of it actually comes from not wanting to come forward because they thought that the Haitian justice system was incapable of fairly prosecuting the case, that it was not even worth it so they didn’t want to partake in the process, which is too bad.  I have also seen a lack of protesters against Duvalier in the courthouse, so it’s hard to tell how much of this is being followed. I ask people in the streets away from my office to tell me if they know about this, the legal community definitely knows, but the average taptap driver on the street kind of knows that this is happening but really isn’t following it that closely. I think it’s really up to the Haitian journalists to really disseminate this.  We’ve all heard statistics, but you’d really have to be 30 years old or older to really remember what happened in the Duvalier’s time. I think that if we get a positive decision, then we will have something that shows he came and he testified, he now has a court order out of the appeals, the Haiti justice system can and does work for justice. That will send a very positive signal that the justice system can and should be used. But it’s hard to say right now about what impact this all is having, many people are very weary of this and don’t know what’s happening.

Brian: Hey Nicole, If I can add something, I was in Haiti in late January I had a good talk with Mario about this and at the time, he was very pessimistic and really assuming that we would lose quickly in the appeals court and would have to go to the Court de Cassassion – the Supreme Court – and would probably quickly lose there and then would have to go to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights where we’d win, and then bring it to the Court of Human Rights and win there, and then we’d be back three to five years back in the Haitian trial court.  He really expect we’d get a fair hearing out of the people’s court so I think the developments of the past few weeks have been really remarkable.  I think we really have completely changed the context, I think it’s due to the work of Nicole and all the BAI lawyers on the ground but also of the journalists who have been covering this, the activists – everybody’s been tweeting and re-tweeting these things…

Min 30:00 – 34:59

(Brian) …we’ve really kind of changed the context to the extent where there’s a lot of pressure on the court and on the government to follow what they’re hearing.  I think it is that pressure which has really made the difference to get to the point to where we are today, and obviously one of the reasons that I am so grateful that so many people are on the call now, that pressure needs to continue to ultimately have the court and the hearing conclude in a fair way.

Nicole: Yeah, that’s right, the one thing I might want to add that Brian mentioned which I forgot to mention in the beginning is that I think one of the reasons Duvalier was forced to testify is because with Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, with so many different human rights organizations all coming out, and the High Commissioner of Human Rights, all these different organizations to put pressure on the Haitian judicial system, made this a fair trial. I think it brought so much pressure on the system that it’s working, which is incredible.

Connor: This is Connor, I have another question, and that is what it seems like from what I’ve been reading is that the State Department just isn’t really interested in this as an issue at all, and if you could tell us a little bit about why you think that’s the case and if there’s any kind of pressure can be put on through congress or anyway so that might push them to change their minds?

Nicole: Brian, do you want to take that?

Brian: Sure, I did a bunch of discussions with the State Department, one of the both promising and frustrating things about the State Department is that it has a real all-star team of human rights lawyers, Michael Posner, who is the Assistant Secretary for Democracy and Human Rights in labor, he actually got his teeth on the Haiti case with the lawyer’s committee of human rights, they’ve got Steven Raft who is the war crimes ambassador whose career is going after people like Duvalier in Africa and despite having some very capable lawyers, who understand the importance of cases like this – the State Department has not, despite a lot of effort, really stepped up.  For anyone who wants an analysis of this, Fran Quigley works at the University of Indiana Law School, wrote a post on Common Dreams and Truth Net called Free Michael Posner, just Google Free Michael Posner or look on our website for that article.  But I think it is a couple of things, the US administration thinks that this could be disruptive to Haiti, the second thing is I think they are friendly with the Martelly government, and this is something that I thing the Martelly government is both officially and in the way of seeing the case, making it known that it is not excited about prosecuting this case.  So I think it is somewhat standing by a friend, and I think its short sided in both ways; yes I think there is a chance for disruption, since people go to the street and need to go to police to control that and in fact these hearings show that the Haitian justice system can in fact pull this off. And I think if it does pull it off, and Duvalier is given a fair trial, you set a great president against political violence and corruption.  Once you do that you are making a very substantial contribution to the long term stability both political and financial of Haiti.  So I’m disappointed that the US government is not taking the opportunity – and it’s not a question, the US is saying that we cannot interfere in Haitian politics, which is inconsistent with its interfering itself in so many ways. It’s also not a question of imposing US will, Haiti has an international law obligation to prosecute – the International Commission on Human Rights, the High Commissioner of Human Rights, Amnesty International Human Rights Watch, have all made that clear and it certainly wouldn’t be overstepping for the United States to say that they recognizes that.

In terms of what people can do, that’s a big question. Maybe we’ll think about, we have worked with people who have made statements, who have approached the State Department that have worked, I have had meetings with [inaudible]. Maybe we should think of something in the pocket here…

Min 35:00–39:59

(Brian) …we actually had many people around here sign a letter, I think it was back a year and a half ago we had a letter signed by dozens of human rights organizations, urging the State Department. Maybe this is a good time to re-circulate that letter in order to do some more other action and active pressure.

Abigail: Excuse me, this is Abigail, calling from Georgia, and I would like to ask a question next please.

Brian: there’s certainly a lot of back noise, can we encourage people to mute their phones again.

Abigail: This is Abigail calling from Atlanta Georgia; I would like to ask a question.

Nicole: Yes please, we would like your question. One thing though is before you start, [inaudible] -.

Brian: Go ahead and ask your question.

Abigail: Yes, I would like to know if the contestants know how this is being covered in the greater Caribbean is it a focus of the news agencies there and how people are reacting to this scenario there?

Brian: I haven’t seen any coverage by any of Haiti’s neighbors. There was actually a pretty good article on Haiti Justice by Ricky Singer in Barbados about the UN response to the cholera claim, but I have not seen anything in the Caribbean press about the Duvalier case.

Abigail: And I will follow up on my own question and check and see what is being covered and what the discussion that is taking place is. Thank you very much.

Brian: And we also have – I’ll ask Myrtha Desulme from Jamaica if she’s seen anything from the Jamaican press.

Abigail: Sister from Jamaica, have you seen or heard anything in the Jamaican press if you are in Jamaica? [pause] I don’t know, we probably lost her.

Brian: Okay maybe she’s lost, but Myrtha is actually is sending anything from the Jamaican press that she sees and she hasn’t sent anything so my guess is that this hasn’t been covered.

Abigail: That is really terrible. If that’s the case that is really, really terrible. Of all places it should have been covered in the Caribbean press, but I don’t want to speak ahead without doing the research to see and inquire.

Matthew: Hey, this is Matthew from Inner City Press, I just wanted to ask about the cholera and the UN cholera dismissal of claims. What do you think could have any impact on the ability to litigate on the cholera claims there? And also just if either of you can provide a response in Haiti about the dismissal by the UN of those claims?

Nicole: Brian, I’ll let you take the first part of that question I’ll take the second part.

Brian: Okay sounds fair. I think that any opportunity to strengthen the justice system is a good one, and therefore is why I think one of the reasons this case is so important to the system because this is an opportunity for everyone in the system to raise their game. They attract attention, they attract interest, they attract resources, and one example of how that works is the Raboteau case that happened in 2000, which really raised the Haitian justice system to a new level not only as it performed at a new level.  There was a perception that people in the justice system as well as its constituents, the citizens of the country that the system could do much better, and that really had a ripple effect, and the Duvalier case is another opportunity to do that – as is the cholera case. We haven’t filed the cholera case in Haitian court but I think that’s one of the alternatives to giving a fair trial to Jean-Claude Duvalier could pave the way for giving a fair trial for victims of the cholera epidemic.

Nicole: In terms of the second question and the effect of the cholera dismissal by the UN, to the folks that care about human rights that is a question that a lot of people are talking about.  I mentioned that we have a group of law students from Boston College here this week and they were interviewing an organizer about demonstrations and those types of things. One of the things the organizer asked is ‘what are you going to do about the…

Min 40:00 – 44:59

(Nicole) …UN’s dismissal about cholera claims.’ It’s something that I think is on the minds of a lot of people. I think there’s also an acceptance, that in Haiti the UN often does what they want with impunity and they’re used to this unfortunately. At the same time, people who care about human rights are very, very upset about this and discouraged by it and unfortunately are not surprised and are wondering what can be done.  They don’t necessarily want this to go away, they want to know what’s the next step, how can we keep fighting? They realize how unjust this is, they realize that people keep dying, and you know, there was a cholera elimination plan that was announced here – I think it was – last week. The Haitian people don’t know about it, nobody I’ve talked to really knows about the cholera elimination plan, so it’s certainly not being disseminated by the Haitian government, by the Haitian media or by the UN. So I think a lot of Haitians just don’t see an end to the deaths that are happening by cholera and want justice and want this to stop.

Matthew: Thanks a lot, that’s helpful.

Brian: Do we have any other questions?

Abigail: I have one.

Brian: Yes, go ahead.

Abigail: The question I have is; are we going to rally around – are you going to – is there anything we can do on this end for those of us who want to raise the ante here and keep the pressure on. Is there any center source or organization we can contact or ways we can support keeping putting the pressure on the courts in Haiti?

Brian: That is a really good question. I’ll answer it by what I suggest, unless Nicole has more great suggestions. I suggest that you cold call to the Haitian lawyers and see what think we can do that might help out. In extension I think that we’ll probably circulate something soon in terms of pushing the United States to take a stand, but there are a couple of things that are pretty easy that people can do. There have been a lot of very good Twitter reports that happen from the court room, Nicole and her feed is @BuddhistLawyer. If you’re on twitter and search for Duvalier you’ll get a lot of people– Nicole’s been doing it, a lot of journalists have been doing it, Amnesty International and Human Rights watch have been sending twitters, and a few other people on the ground in Haiti. I’d encourage everybody to just keep the word circulating around by re-tweeting some of the good tweets from the ground. Certainly people who want to write, there’s plenty of room to write, and we’d be happy to suggest angles to people who want to op-ed write a paper on why this is important or why the US government should step up. All these things are useful. I’ll let Nicole add whatever she has to that.

Nicole: I would also love to see more movement in Haiti and on the Haitian government as well. I think that there has been a lot of media covering this, and I think it’s really important.  We could have more op-eds like Brian mentioned and more tweets in Kreyol and French as well.   I think that’s important among the Haitian diaspora group in the United States, potentially putting pressure on Congressional districts in Florida, New York and other representatives. What I’ve heard a lot of is that there are a lot of Duvalier victims out there, unfortunately, and that for so many reasons that are very understandable, a lot of them haven’t really mobilized around this. If there is any chance for them to renew hope and try to join in the activism.  I think that could make a huge, huge impact both locally with US representatives who live in New York but also who live in Haiti.

Abigail: Ms. Nicole, I thank you very much. I also am a member of a community radio program that covers the Latin America and Caribbean here at WRFG89.3 and I was wondering if there is anyone from your organization that I’m making some contact in some Haitian…

Min 45:00 – 49:59

(Abigail) …community here in Atlanta to do some coverage here in that area but also if I could have someone from your organization as well to interview then sometime in the future I would be very thankful.

Nicole: Yes, we would be very happy to do so, thank you for asking.

Abigail: Thank you, and how would we be able to stay in contact – I mean how could I reach you?

Nicole: Yes – anybody can reach me with questions at Nicole@ijdh.org feel free to email me, and to touch on what Brian said on twitter @IJDH and also myself is @BuddhistLawyer — any of those work so keep in touch with us please.

Abigail: Okay and I do get emails from your organization and I’m sure I’m going to see – that’s where I found out about this webinar. Let’s see – well thank you for agreeing to support us as well.

Roger: Hi it’s Roger– just a few quick points from Canada, we’ll be having meetings in the next week or two weeks in Montreal at least to try and get better organized on this issue because it has been really quite striking and disturbing on the follow-up news coverage of the case precisely in the moment that it was actually making some progress by bringing in [inaudible] .I don’t think there was a single report about the outcome of the first debate.  There are a few articles and still even not too much there saying that even to appear to a judge on the 21st or so.  I don’t understand this because last year there were a pretty steady stream of reports, and at least one editorial in the Toronto Star, but it seems to have dropped away which points to the need for us to get organized on this in Canada. It seems that unless we are doing more pressuring and advocating then we’re not going to get the response from media. Were still a long way from getting anyone in Ottawa to speak out about the issue, but I guess there’s aspects of recent events that are disturbing for us. Um, I did notice in the Haitian press in the last couple of days some pretty significant statements both on the cholera issue and now on the editorial on  [inaudible]  about the hundreds of millions of dollars that were gained from the petrol program. So there is obviously the capacity in Haiti and official circles in Haiti to question government policies but I guess it’s still the case that the Duvalier process is hands-off shall we say on Haitians a higher society, but hopefully over time with the kind of work that’s happening that even that can begin to turn around. So that’s a brief summary from us here north of the border.

Caller F: You know it’s very interesting that Argentina has made a move that I think could translate into what is happening with Duvalier in Haiti.

Nicole: Yeah, the Center for Economic and Policy Research did a really good article on their Haiti blog that talks about the US government as well, and kind of puts it into context how historic this prosecution is against this oppressive dictator. It’s a really good article that I recommend. So I was going to email it but since you’re on the phone, I just did an interview with Carol Off show on PRI and I just taped that show about an hour ago and she is broadcasting, and at least one CBC program is interested.

Roger: Yeah that’s a very important program that I listen to so that important to know that. I’ll have to write them a letter and thank them, I’ll look in my file and I’ll have to apologize to them for it (laughs) or maybe because I wrote the letter they’re doing it, who knows!

Nicole: Her questions were very, very good and in general I found, last week Al Jazeera was in Haiti, and we got some interest from the BBC Mark Doyle and then…

Min 50:00 – 54:59

(Nicole) …the CBC program. But really, that’s about all with the press – well and newspapers obviously, in Haiti and some others, and a few articles but really that’s about all the news internationally. The Economist wrote a really good article about linking the impunity of Duvalier and the Minustah with the cholera case, but other than that, there really hasn’t been that much coverage. There was much more coverage after Duvalier testified versus the victims testifying even though I thought their stories were much more compelling.

Jasmine: Hi Nicole, this is Jasmine, I just wanted to ask one quick question then I have to shoot off and I’m sure everyone else does too, but what could happen if this goes through and Duvalier is found guilty? What the maximum penalty, the maximum charge he’s facing?

Nicole: That’s a good question for Brian.

Jasmine: I mean given he’s in his 80’s and he’s ailing.

Nicole: He’s 61 but he is in the hospital now–

Jasmine: How old is he?

Nicole: He’s only 61; he was only 19 when he made president for life–

Jasmine: 61! He looks older than that, he looks like 80. [Laughs] well what is happening– what could happen to him?

Brian: Well the sentence for pre-meditative murder, and I believe for some of the more serious torture charges is life in prison for pre-meditative murder without an excuse I know is life in prison, so I guess that’s probably what it would be although it is possible that most of the cases that are there are false imprisonment cases and I believe for those the likely penalty is 10 years depending on what exactly is proven. But typically in Haitian courts there is a – judges do not have a lot of discretion there’s a basic charge, and a basic statutory for the crime, and it can be raised or lowered depending on different factors. It’s pretty much a calculation according to the book on how much time he gets.

Caller E: Brian and Nicole, what do you actually have to prove here, is it actually the missing link the guys who say ‘he told me to do it’ or the piece of paper that says he knew actually play in here. I guess the legal thing that you actually need to prove crimes against humanity etcetera, etcetera of his knowledge of planning of those and then the practical one of what you think you might need in the Haitian context.

Brian: In terms of the formals, none of the victims as far as I’m concerned will say ‘Duvalier tortured me’ or ‘I saw him shoot somebody’ and so it’s based on his leadership role. Now there’s one way of establishing liability and that is the jury, what his leadership role was according to law, and what his leadership role was according to the law as head of the armed force and head of the Tonton Macoutes. So he did have that kind of official control and what he will then say is ‘well I didn’t have the real control’ and then he can introduce evidence to say that he really didn’t control and I think that evidence will be much more persuasive at the beginning of his reign when he was 19 rather than later in his reign when he had been in office for 15 years and had appointed many of the people who were running the torturing. We can also get liability by showing the de facto practical elements of control and there’s plenty of that. He did transfer people, he was able to hire and fire people, and another thing we can do is – he has an obligation and even if he wasn’t involved in overseeing the people who were doing the crimes, in his job he had an obligation once he was aware of any massive human rights violations to punish anybody who was involved, and we have ample evidence…

Min 55:00 – 59:59

…from Amnesty International, the Human Rights Watch, Commission, many embassies, saying that they gave to Duvalier these reports that there were these problems and they weren’t all correct, you know one of the things he said in his trial was that ‘well, when I was told there were problems, I corrected them’. There’s very strong evidence that that’s not true, he did correct some in a very cosmetic way, but he did not investigate or correct many of the problems.  Clearly he did not punish the people who were responsible for it.

Caller E: Thanks.

Gimond: I have a question. My name is Gimond from Atlanta, Georgia. Duvalier keeps comparing his regimes to current regimes after him, which means that it seems like after the post regimes of Duvalier has more crime so what would be the implication of the next terms after Duvalier?

Brian: Okay, Nicole signals me, I think she wants me to take this. First of all, it’s not an excuse that other people committed crimes are not an excuse for him committing crimes. In terms of prosecution of other people, I think that no one is above the law and that if there is any serious evidence of any of Duvalier’s successors then that should be described before a court. I will say there’s serious evidence against Duvalier because I have seen human rights reports – I have seen boxes and boxes filled with reports of people tortured, of checks written to cash for 50 thousand dollars, so I’m confident in saying there’s a case against Jean-Claude Duvalier. I’m not confident of evidence for his successors, we were involved in a case of the leaders of the 91 to 94 dictatorship where they were in fact all convicted based on a lot of evidence. Other than that I’m not sure for any of the other successors right up to the current regime if there is that kind of documentation. If there is, people should bring it forward, if there is I don’t think it’s a justified use of the justice system. In many cases, if you’re going after people without having the documents to prove or that should be able to prove more in itself is a human rights violation.

Gimond: Well I’m pretty sure that from Duvalier until up to 2010 or 2009, even or 2008, we have plenty evidence of human atrocities against the Haitian people, you know each government and each regime comes with its own pair militaries, to terrify, it’s not a matter of evidence for the case. The reason I bring up this is what is it that if they are trying to have some kind of national reconciliation well if course national reconciliation is not considered justice, it’s really in a way so that we can really bring peace in Haiti, because you’ll have to kill every Haitian because all Haitians commit crimes. You know in Haiti there is any kind of governments up the path.

Brian: Yeah that’s a good question, and first of all, obviously you answered the part that you can’t have reconciliation without justice. I actually think the justice system is a good way of working some of these issues out because if you don’t have justice you can have this cycle of violence where everybody uses violence and everyone can equally say that someone else did it so it justifies my violence. I think that no one can justify violence against innocence or civilians because others did the same thing. There have been allegations, and again I’ve worked on some cases on some regimes where there’s been some cases we haven’t brought because didn’t evidence and some we did. Also you have to make the distinction between criminality that takes place during administration’s term in office and criminality that is attachable to those top officials. You know, today I’m sure there are some police officers somewhere in the United States who…

Min 1:00:00 – 1:04:59

(Brian) …beat someone up but that’s not necessarily reputable to President Obama. If President Obama systematically supports police officers who are beating up his political opponents, then maybe you have a case but you don’t automatically do that and I think that there’s been a lot of talk about responsibility for people at the top but without people going through and making links. Something with the Duvalier case is you have to make the links, you have to go through and figure what is the exact date of the person at the top and the actual person doing the crime and figuring out the different factors that make that crime down at the low level imputable to the top levels.

Gimond: Yes, thank you. You know my last question is that I’m just concerned about the statutes of limitations and international law, these are such things that you can go far back, up to 25 years back to prosecute someone, you know what does international law say about the statutes of limitation.

Brian: Sure, I’ll take that too and Nicole can add in anything if I’m missing it. That’s one of Mr. Duvalier’s main arguments that the structure used to dismiss the case that these crimes are far beyond the ten year statute of limitations that Haiti has. And that is true that it is beyond ten years, but there is a principle in international law that if it involves crimes against humanity then you do not imply the statute of limitations and so there really is none. For someone who is committing a crime against humanity, where there is a very specific definition of what that is, I’m not going to get it exactly right but it contains serious crimes down to murder torture, rape, that are done on a widespread and systematic attack against civilians on account of their political opinion or membership in a group. So if you meet all those factors then it does become a crime against humanity and under international law no statute of limitations should be applied. The way that it’s applied in Haiti, they say that this is one of the things that Duvalier’s lawyers have argued is that it doesn’t apply to Haiti, they’re correct in saying that he hasn’t signed – there’s actually an application on ability of statute of limitations against the Haitian community. He’s not a part of that statute and Duvalier’s lawyers are correct in saying that the reason why the international principle of no statute of limitations is applicable to Haiti is that the Inter-American court has said it is, and so Haiti has ratified both the American convention on human rights and the statute of future American court on human rights. Once he ratifies a treaty, according to Haiti’s own constitution, ratifying that treaty automatically relates to international law and the Inter-American court has interpreted the American convention saying that statute of limitations don’t apply and this has been the case in Argentina, in Peru, in I think Brazil, and some other South American countries and those countries of acceptance there is actually a very interesting Argentinian case where it was sent up to the Supreme Court where you can’t apply statutory of limitations. The argument of the Supreme Court when it got back to them was that we really disagree with this decision but we have no choice where it’s binding law whereas Argentina has accepted that it’s binding law and Haiti’s in the same position now. Haiti’s accepting that its jurisdiction now that it’s binding court and it’s a right guaranteed by the American Convention on Human Rights to the victims that the statute of limitations does not apply.

Gimond: Okay thank you.

Brian: That’s explained in some of the materials on our website.  Our website again, I know that Nicole mentioned it but again it’s IJDH.org and then we’ve got a section on the Duvalier case where we have the human rights report that Francis talks about some of the statements from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights talks about. And for people who read French, there’s a great article by a guy named Johnson Mardi, m-a-r-d-i, in French that explains a lot of the details of how international law applies in this situation.

Caller E: Brian, just one thing, you said that most of the cases now of victims Nicole has been detailing…

Min 1:05:00 – 1:09:59

(Caller E): … with the six in legal detention, but you listed a whole series of criteria or threshold to reach that standard of prosecution so to speak. Is there disconnect there?

Brian: No, okay so I’ll talk a little bit about those details. If we brought one case and said this person was beaten and that’s all we talked about, what happened to that person, then we would not have crimes against humanity, but torture and false imprisonment are some types of crime that can be crimes against humanity. And then we had to jump through the hoop for each of the qualifications. We explain that this is part of a wide-spread and systematic attack, which is what Alix was talking about, that this is a system that was set up. So we said that there is – I think 28 official complaints before the court, but our evidence and the tests we put in writing and the testimonies of the opponents show and continue to show that this is part of tens of thousands–

Caller E: Right, so this is why they saw in January that this is so important, because they saw the three deaths a week and everything.

Brian: Yes, and that’s also why the reports from Amnesty International and the reports on Human Rights are so important and other facts like why they were arrested are important, for example when Alix was getting beaten, and I don’t know the details, but whether the jailers said this is to make you shut up to make you stop going to meetings, that kind of due to their political opinion and this is to show that it was done due to their political positions

Caller E: Thanks

Caller G: I have a question. I’ve heard that around seven or so years ago there had been a conviction overturned by a military leader Jean Blain more or less because he had friends in the new government and the risk of something similar unfolding here seeing that there is an initial case to dismiss the cases before Duvalier came into power.  There have been allegations that there are a lot of people from Duvalier’s case and supporters of him in this current government that you risk dismissal of the appeals court potentially independent of the judiciary?

Brian: I think you’ve really hit upon the issue and the quick answer is that we don’t know and we’ll find out I think that if you look at the course of prosecution where you had Duvalier’s prosecution and as soon as Martelly came in that prosecution stopped.  And for a background I don’t think anybody– any member of Martelly’s cabinet who was an active Duvalier but there are several members, including his Prime Minister’s over his term, has been sons of ministers and other high officials in the Duvalier government. It’s been widely reported that the prime minister of Duvalier is an official counselor in the national palace but recently the Prime Minister’s office has been denying that. There have been many reports of people seeing him in the palace and certainly the fact that the government has not been prosecuting Duvalier which leads to the conclusion that is supported.  If you look at the prosecution made by the officers that say drop all charges that appear, and if you look at the order by the judge dropping the political violence charges– that appear publicized because it’s political and I can’t say that every case we lose is because it’s political, but if you look at it is a couple pages long, it is a really complicated issue where we had presented fairly complicated evidence, and you have other people putting in some fairly strong legal analysis and instead of going through those legal analysis and meeting the arguments made, the investigating judge made like a two page thing just dismissing it in court, clearly not reaching the important legal issues which leads to think that the decision was based more on the politics then on the law. I think that we’ll see that – well I know we should ask Mario – a few weeks ago he would have said we had very little chance at the court of appeal, that the government was

Min 1:10:00 – 1:14:59

(Brian) …going to exercise its influence and it’s unlikely we’ll get a fairly judged trial. I think that has been changed. Perhaps we underestimated the courage of the court of appeals but I also think that such interest has been kind of a public outcry in favor of fair prosecution, which makes it a lot easier for the appeals court to step up and to do a good job. And I think this is an example of a virtuous cycle that every trial by pushing we got the court to feel comfortable or under pressure to be sure that Duvalier testifies. Once that he testifies and that gets out to the public, the public are very engaged in this issue and that will increase the support for the prosecution.  Certainly today the fact that will be widely reported on the radio news tonight, tomorrow, you had the victims talking about what happened. That will have a very big impact on Haitian society especially because over half of all Haitians alive today were born well after Duvalier left and so this is an excellent opportunity to do popular education, which I’m pretty confident that popular education on this issue will lead to a stronger constituency for justice.

Caller G: Thank you.

Caller H: Is it possible to ask about next steps in the cholera situation?

Brian: Sure, I’ll give you the quick next step which is; right now I’m actually working in New York to do exactly that – we’re working on preparing the case to file on a national court. We haven’t decided which national court, but the options we are looking at most closely are Haiti, US courts in the Netherlands and Belgium but we don’t think there’s any opportunity to convince the UN to re-visit their decision to deny our claim. We first tried to deal with UN internal procedures, but that door appears to be closed and locked so we now decided to go to a national court and so the national court should not allow the UN because the UN is refusing to comply with their moral obligation to provide an alter mechanism for justice.

Caller E: Brian, this is Dutch national courts, not the international criminal court, right?

Brian: Correct, as far as we know there is no international court that would accept jurisdiction in this case, we would have to do it in a national court.

Caller H: And why the Netherlands as an option?

Brian: Well the Netherlands and Belgium both have a record for being fairly progressive on human rights issues in general. More important than that there have been many European court decisions on human rights basically saying that immunity can mean impunity, that if an international organization fails to provide an alternative mechanism then courts should not enforce the immunity probation. As well, we don’t have as strong language in the US court or other advantages of US court. So we’re weighing if it’s better to take advantage of the US court, which is a highly respected court system and it’s something closer for the Haitians to get to then Europe, but there’s also advantages to the European court because the European court is human rights juries.

Caller E: But Brian, you’re thinking again of going to national court in Belgium and the Netherlands and not to an EU court.

Brian: So we’d file initially in national court, and rely on what the European court’s jurors prove, and we might have to go to the European court. But we filed in Belgium, and if the Belgium court dismisses it because of the immunity issue, we would then appeal to the European court and ask them to instruct the Belgium court not to invoke immunity.

Caller E: Are Belgians or Dutch best rather than Danes or Swedes or Fins?

Brian: Well, we’d be happy to talk about this – we have other suggestions because most of the people we’ve talked to so far have told us that those two countries are probably the best. We are certainly open to anyone who has other suggestions; we’ll look at anything that might help.

Caller E: Brian, one thing on that, is when you read the SOFA…

Min 1:15:00 – 1:19:59

(Caller E): …so basically the standing claims commission was supposed to kick in as soon as there was a petition, right?

Brian: Correct.

Caller E: Now there’s no distinct – as I read it – no distinct mechanism to say how that happens except you’re supposed to have one appointee nominate from the Haitian government and one from the UN and one neutral agreement as I understand it. Why can, in a Haitian court, could you not take action by say that the government has not lived up to the SOFA in not nominating somebody, it’s candidate in the standing claim’s commission?

Brian: Yeah, there are actually some lawyers who will go and do that – some lawyers who have worked with the BAI who have worked cases. To tell you the truth, Mario Joseph and the BAI lawyers have been working pretty hard on the Duvalier case recently and I haven’t had a chance to talk to them about it, but there are Haitian lawyers who have gone so much to the Haitian government asking them to explain why it hasn’t followed through on the SOFA. I think that’s in interesting fact to see whether that works, although it might be too late now that you have the UN that has formally denied consideration of these claims. I’m not sure how that would work out, especially one of the good things that makes it a little more interesting in pursuit of this case is that there isn’t more precedent. The standing claims commission, as far as we know, every status is a forced agreement which part of the commission for 60 years but the standing claims commission despite that has never been set out a single time, and so we don’t have a lot of precedent.  There is some ambiguity in the process for setting up and our position is that we were not necessarily on setting up the standing claims commission, we were willing to work with the UN to come up with something as long as it provided base fairness to our clients, we’d be willing to consider a whole range of possibilities

Caller E: Might you not have to try and do something like that to try and cover yourself in another jurisdiction because that’s the agreement on which, basically, Minustah came in – UN troop came in – that’s the agreement between the Haitian government and the UN, which these people operate in this country. That is nominally the first step, isn’t it? A national court might say to you, for instance, ‘well, you know, what have you done to get the standing claims commission up and running?’

Brian: Yeah we don’t think that’s an obstacle, and I don’t want to get too much into the details until we can have a private discussion on this if you think its desirable but briefly, the SOFA is vague enough that there are other things besides the standing claims commission that would be acceptable to it. In fact, it happens every day that Minustah has a claims unit that is processing claims all the time and providing compensation. There’s a long UN tradition of doing that, and I don’t think we needed or the UN needed to necessarily to fit into the box of the standing claims commission, which has never been set up. I think the right is not to have immunity to [inaudible] the victims but is to have a fair mechanism for dispute resolution. We don’t want to get tied up in what the Haitian government should do, our focus is on the UN which has an obligation to provide a remedy, we are more flexible on that remedy but I think that the UN has foreclosed any discussion of this, and so we’re now going to a national court and saying it’s not that the UN has refused to set up a claims commission, it’s the refusal to give a remedy which is, at the end, our client’s right to a remedy. Our problem with the stating claims commission is that its self could be problematic. You mentioned the commission is set up with representatives from the UN, representative from Haiti and representative from Geneva, in this situation you’ve got the UN and the Haitian government who has said quite clearly that they don’t think that this case has merit and so that even if they did establish a standing claims commission based on the rules, we would say that that commissions do not meet our basic due process requirements, because it’s made by a couple of people who already prejudged, for example names of organizations of that have already prejudged to be meritless. So we don’t really want to get hung up on the standing claim’s commission, it’s the fundamental right to justice of our clients.

Caller E: I just wonder if somebody outside of you at IJDH and BAI, you know some sort of…

Min 1:20:00 – 1:24:59

(Caller E): …legal body or legal group shouldn’t be trying to keep pressure on the UN saying ‘well, why hasn’t this happened?’ You know, completely besides the fact of what you do, will you proceed, the UN is off the hook until another national jurisdiction even agrees to consider this, and probably is off the hook anyway. I don’t know, I just mean if you had a bunch of lawyers, or professors or something, alright, people who have been involved in UN law and some case histories go back here you know in Bosnia and elsewhere, say well why hasn’t this thing been met, why hasn’t it been activated, why hasn’t it been nominated. I mean, it wouldn’t say what you were doing.

Brian: There are actually people who are pushing, not hard enough, but there are people pushing within the UN and people from outside aren’t a lot of those issues – particularly someone setting up the commission in Haiti more general the UN needs to respond more responsibly to these cases.

Caller E: Okay, right, thanks.

Brian: Okay, we’ve held Nicole longer then we said we would, and I know she’s pretty tired after a long day and a long week of work on the Duvalier case, so I think we will probably bring the call to an end now. I’d like to thank Nicole obviously for coming on and everyone else for asking so many great questions, and we’ll send out a message soon but I think that tonight’s conversations was very valuable. If we can convince Nicole next Thursday I’d like to do that, so we’ll definitely let you know more about that. In the meantime please continue to keep spreading the word by twitter, by Facebook, by sending emails on to keep the profile of this case up there.

Abigail: Thank you for creating this space so that we could have this conversation and continue to be informed this is Abigail in Atlanta signing off.

Nicole: Thank you very much

Various thanks.

END 1:22:45

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