The human rights com­mu­nity has been sharply split over Haiti since the late 1990s. From one per­spec­tive, Haitians’ main prob­lems con­sisted of civil and polit­i­cal rights violations–brutal tac­tics used by lead­ers once beloved by all, cor­rup­tion in min­istries, and the with­er­ing of demo­c­ra­tic ideals. From another point of view, the Hait­ian peo­ple were suf­fer­ing grave vio­la­tions of their eco­nomic and social rights as a result of the delib­er­ate hob­bling of the gov­ern­ment by the inter­na­tional community’s neolib­eral poli­cies and block­ing of aid. Like most polar­ized dis­courses, this one held ker­nels of truth and also missed big parts of the pic­ture. The fact is that the wide­spread, per­va­sive denial of the most basic eco­nomic and social rights in Haiti–to food, water, and healthcare–has, since the found­ing of the repub­lic, been inter­twined with the inabil­ity of the nation’s poor­est peo­ple to access jus­tice on a daily basis. It’s time to put to bed the idea that civil and polit­i­cal rights com­pete with eco­nomic and social rights, or that one set of rights is more cru­cial than the other.Haiti has itself had a com­pli­cated rela­tion­ship to the con­cept of human rights. Born of the auda­cious idea that the French dec­la­ra­tion des droits de l’homme actu­ally referred to all human beings–including those who were bru­tally enslaved–Haiti has been ostra­cized and pun­ished by the inter­na­tional com­mu­nity ever since. Some­times this ostracism has come through the dis­course of human rights itself. Per­haps the best his­tor­i­cal exam­ple is the crush­ing indem­nity the fledg­ling Hait­ian state was coerced to pay to France in the name of the right to prop­erty in 1825–a pay­ment by a newly free peo­ple as the price of free­ing them­selves. More recently, the inter­na­tional community–led by the United States–blocked in 2001 a series of loans aimed in part at reha­bil­i­tat­ing and extend­ing the health and water systems–crucial to the ful­fill­ment of the rights to health and life. Amid alle­ga­tions of faulty par­lia­men­tary elec­tions, the United States used the lan­guage of civil and polit­i­cal rights to halt dis­burse­ment of loans that would have funded clean water sys­tems and improved san­i­ta­tion for Haitians in poor com­mu­ni­ties. In addi­tion, the U.S. government’s years-long pol­icy of send­ing for­eign aid to non-governmental orga­ni­za­tions while bypass­ing the gov­ern­ment helped weaken the already frag­ile Hait­ian state’s abil­ity to effec­tively gov­ern. By def­i­n­i­tion, NGOs rarely con­struct infra­struc­ture and pub­lic works. They do not orga­nize elec­tions or pay the salaries of judges and police offi­cers. Improv­ing human rights through NGOs alone, there­fore, is a fool’s errand.

Now, as Haitians suf­fer in the shadow of ruined gov­ern­ment min­istries charged with ensur­ing basic ser­vices; as indi­vid­u­als who have lan­guished for years with­out trial walk free after their prison walls cracked open; and as the inter­na­tional com­mu­nity meets in north­ern cap­i­tals to plot Haiti’s future, it’s time to adopt a sin­gle rights-based stan­dard for the recov­ery and devel­op­ment of Haiti. This time, it’s cru­cial that the dis­course of human rights not be used to defeat state-building and pop­u­lar par­tic­i­pa­tion. As the bud­gets of large U.S.- and Europe-based human­i­tar­ian aid NGOs swell, the inter­na­tional com­mu­nity owes it to the Hait­ian peo­ple to adopt the same human rights stan­dards for itself that it has used to cri­tique the Hait­ian gov­ern­ment. This rights-based standard–which requires capacity-building, trans­parency, account­abil­ity, and participation–should apply to all efforts to improve the sit­u­a­tion in Haiti.

To ensure capacity-building and par­tic­i­pa­tion, the inter­na­tional community–donor states, large NGOs, and the United Nations–must part­ner closely with the Hait­ian gov­ern­ment and the nation’s peo­ple in its relief and rebuild­ing efforts. The aim should be to for­tify and expand a pub­lic infra­struc­ture that ulti­mately belongs to the Hait­ian peo­ple. With­out this, NGOs may cre­ate pri­va­tized sys­tems that are not account­able to the pop­u­la­tion. Rebuild­ing and con­struc­tion should be based on plans designed with the par­tic­i­pa­tion of the Hait­ian pop­u­la­tion. Using the model of Zanmi Las­ante (Part­ners In Health), which has suc­cess­fully part­nered with the Min­istry of Health for decades, orga­ni­za­tions should join with their coun­ter­parts in rel­e­vant min­istries to improve pub­lic sys­tems and invest in Hait­ian human cap­i­tal. Food aid orga­ni­za­tions should work closely with the Min­istry of Agri­cul­ture to ensure that their aid does not dis­place local mar­kets. Water assis­tance should be under­taken in coop­er­a­tion with the Min­istry of Pub­lic Works so that the man­age­ment of new purifi­ca­tion plants and kiosks are account­able to the Hait­ian peo­ple. New schools should be built in con­junc­tion with the Min­istry of Edu­ca­tion and made avail­able to chil­dren for free. The bulk of the work–and thus, the bulk of the salaries for this work–should go to Haitians, not vol­un­teers or con­sul­tants from rich coun­tries. When exper­tise is needed, it should be sought in Haiti; if it can’t be located inside the coun­try, Haitians in the dias­pora should be recruited as a mat­ter of pri­or­ity, and invest­ment should be made in train­ing Haitians.

To ensure account­abil­ity, the inter­na­tional com­mu­nity, led by the United Nations, should com­mit to trans­parency from top to bot­tom. The United Nations Envoy to Haiti, for­mer Pres­i­dent Bill Clin­ton, should set up a mon­i­tor­ing body that would func­tion openly–perhaps through an inter­ac­tive web­site mod­eled on recovery.gov, cou­pled with pop­u­lar means of com­mu­ni­ca­tion in Haiti (like the radio)–where every sin­gle dol­lar of aid pledged to Haiti can be tracked. Ana­lysts should be enlisted in donor states to ensure that their gov­ern­ments deliver on promised aid, and Hait­ian mon­i­tors should be employed to report on what is actu­ally hap­pen­ing on the ground. Progress and obsta­cles alike should be made pub­lic, and human rights vio­la­tions must be reported and redressed. A com­plaints sys­tem should be put in place to ensure that when things go wrong, some redress is avail­able, no mat­ter the iden­tity of the per­pe­tra­tor. This dual-direction trans­parency would go a long way toward fos­ter­ing account­abil­ity for both donors and recipients.

Finally, rec­og­niz­ing that human rights prin­ci­ples must gov­ern engage­ment with Haiti means that the inter­na­tional com­mu­nity should for­give Haiti’s remain­ing inter­na­tional debt. With­out com­plete debt relief, the Hait­ian gov­ern­ment will be required to com­mit resources to loan repay­ment that could oth­er­wise go to ful­fill­ing the human rights of the pop­u­la­tion to food, water, and edu­ca­tion. It also requires dis­man­tling the unfair agri­cul­tural sub­si­dies that north­ern states pay to their farm­ers, which have under­mined Haiti’s domes­tic and export agri­cul­tural mar­kets. Remov­ing the shack­les of unfair trade and debt will allow Haiti to build an econ­omy that serves its peo­ple instead of inter­na­tional cred­i­tors. The lan­guage of rights may have become hol­low in recent years as advo­cates spoke past each other, but these prin­ci­ples can now guide the rebuild­ing of a rav­aged nation founded on the idea that human rights could free us all.

This paper was orig­i­nally deliv­ered at “Haiti in Con­text: Per­spec­tives on the Cur­rent Cri­sis” a roundtable/teach-in orga­nized by the Cen­ter for Latin Amer­i­can and Caribbean Stud­ies, NYU, Jan­u­ary 20, 2010.

Mar­garet Sat­terth­waite is Asso­ciate Pro­fes­sor of Clin­i­cal Law and Fac­ulty Direc­tor of the Cen­ter for Human Rights and Global Jus­tice (CHRGJ) at NYU School of Law. Along with col­lab­o­ra­tors from CHRGJ, Zanmi Las­ante, Part­ners In Health, and the RFK Cen­ter for Jus­tice and Human Rights, she co-authored Wòch nan Soley: The Denial of the Right to Water in Haiti (2008). The same team is now col­lab­o­rat­ing on a project on the right to food in Haiti. Satt­terth­waite worked for the Com­mis­sion nationale de vérité et de jus­tice in 1995 and has worked on human rights issues in Haiti in a vari­ety of capac­i­ties since.