Photo taken by Andres Martinez Casares for The New York Times

LES CAYES, Haiti — It is a legal spectacle unlike anything Haiti has seen: the government trying 13 of its own police officers — including high-ranking prison officials and riot squad members — on charges of murder, attempted murder or other crimes stemming from a prison massacre here last year.

Now in its third week, this intense drama is unfolding in a public theater at the center of town where hundreds of local residents wedge themselves into every corner and crevice as they watch in suffocating heat what the new government trumpets as the blossoming of Haiti’s rule of law.

By American legal standards, the trial in this provincial seaside city is more than a little bizarre: small bottles of Roi des Coqs rum are sold inside the doorway; defense lawyers shout insults at the judge, claiming the trial is fixed; observers cheer as if they were at a soccer game, while some witnesses testify in semidarkness because the building has no lights.

Yet for all its quirks, the trial of these police officers — 21 more have been charged but are not yet in custody — is remarkable given Haiti’s history of ruthless dictators, corrupt courts and unpunished crimes. Three inmates testified on Thursday against the same police force that was guarding them in the prison in Les Cayes, accusing the defendants of indiscriminate executions and beatings.

One prosecution witness, Patrick Olcine, told the judge last week that he had been shot in the back but had never gone to the hospital. Asked why, Mr. Olcine replied: “They were taking dead people and living people, and they were picking them up together. I didn’t want them to pick me up and go bury me.”

More than 20 detainees died and at least 15 were wounded, said Jean-Marie J. Salomon, the lead prosecutor in the case.

Josué Pierre-Louis, Haiti’s new justice minister, showed his support by visiting the trial late last week. “Haiti has a reputation for impunity,” he said. “This trial is a valuable opportunity to show justice is working, to show that no one is above the law.”

The massacre took place amid the chaos after Haiti’s devastating earthquake on Jan. 12, 2010, and the government largely accepted the explanation of prison officials that a single detainee had fatally shot the inmates during a disturbance at the prison.

But an investigation by The New York Times in May 2010 contradicted that account. It found that the officers had shot unarmed prisoners, then sought to cover it up, in part by burying bodies in unmarked graves.

As a result, an independent commission, financed by the Haitian government and the United Nations, investigated and concluded that Haitian officers had opened fire “deliberately and without justification.” The report included accusations of hidden bodies, rearranged cadavers and wounded prisoners left dying in their cells.

The exact number of dead detainees is not known.

The accused include the warden of the prison, Sylvestre Larack, and the leader of the riot police, Olritch Beaubrun. Mr. Larack, who was later promoted to run the national penitentiary in Port-au-Prince, is among those on trial in Les Cayes, several hours by car from the capital. Mr. Beaubrun is believed to have fled to Canada.

Human rights observers worry that reaching a fair verdict could be difficult because of limited funds for the prosecution and an ever-present atmosphere of intimidation and threats.

Given the problem of seating a jury in Haiti, the case will be decided by the judge. But keeping control of the proceedings has not been easy.

Mr. Salomon, the prosecutor, said he and many of his witnesses had been threatened. “I’m a strong boy,” he said last week. “I’m going to do my job.”

Later that same day, while the accused were climbing into a police van, one of them threatened a Times reporter. “The people of Les Cayes will deal with you,” the officer said in Creole.

Earlier, defense lawyers clashed loudly with the judge, shouting objections as he futilely rang a small bell, which functions as a gavel. After a particularly heated exchange, the defense lawyers tore off their robes and left the court.

The judge suspended the proceedings, then told the accused that if their lawyers did not reappear the following morning, he would not resume the trial for six months and they would have to remain behind bars.

The next morning, the defense lawyers returned to the court on schedule.

The shootings, according to witnesses interviewed by The Times last year, can be traced to the aftermath of the earthquake, when worried detainees, most of them not convicted of crimes but awaiting trial, clamored to be released from the squalid prison.

The most vocal were beaten and stuffed into a cell that was already overcrowded, witnesses said. Bathroom privileges were taken away. A week later, when a guard opened a cell door so waste buckets could be removed, the occupants overwhelmed him, taking his keys and freeing the rest of the prisoners.

What happened next — the prosecutor compared it to a “horror film” — is what the trial is all about. Detainees say they were hit with tear gas and told to lie facedown on the ground. When they complied, the prisoners said, they were shot, either on the ground or in their cells.

The prosecution’s entire case is based on the testimony of prisoners, a point repeatedly underscored by the defense. One lawyer, Jean Eugene Pierre-Louis, told the judge that the government had “no ballistic reports, no death certificates, no autopsy, nothing like this.”

The prosecutor responded, “If we don’t have evidence for the bodies, that’s because it was made to disappear.”

Mr. Olcine, the prosecution witness, said that after police officers fired tear gas, they entered the yard shooting. “As soon as they would pass an open cell, they would shoot inside the open cell,” he said. He said he could not identify the officers who were shooting.

Mr. Olcine said he believed that as many as 36 prisoners had been killed or wounded, and he added: “I was counting the number of bodies that were taken out. I don’t know who was dead and who was alive, but I was counting the number they left with.”

The prosecution said in court papers that the police officers under the command of Mr. Beaubrun had ordered inmates to lie facedown, and then they opened fire.

The defense contends that detainees are lying to the court to get even with the police for putting them in prison. “We are looking to obtain the truth,” Fritz Petit, a defense lawyer, said in an interview. “No one in my opinion can claim to know exactly what happened unless they have seen x killing y.

Florence Élie, Haiti’s ombudsman, said she was concerned for the safety of prosecution witnesses. For that reason, Ms. Élie said that on Thursday morning she visited all the witnesses at the prison in Les Cayes. “I just spoke to all 20 of them,” she said. “All said that there have been threats.”

Ms. Élie said she also stayed in touch with the accused, who at one time had been kept in the national penitentiary, where other inmates had “almost killed them.” The defendants are now being held in a jail in Les Cayes apart from the witnesses.

Eleven years ago, dozens of former military and paramilitary officials were tried in Haiti for a massacre in Raboteau. That trial was considered a watershed moment for Haitian justice. But the convictions were subsequently overturned, and the legal system has remained weak.

The trial here, in which the government is prosecuting current officials, presents another potential turning point. William G. O’Neill, a human rights lawyer and an expert on Haiti, said: “This case is like a testing of the waters to see if the rule of law is ready to grow. As the Creole saying goes, ‘Twig by twig the bird builds its nest.’ ”

See Original Post: “Raucous Trial Is a Test of Haiti’s Legal System”

Year: 2011

Length: 6:06 minutes (5.58 MB)

Format: MP3 Mono 44kHz 128Kbps (CBR)

Today, in Haiti a trial opened for police and prison officials charged in connection to the killing of prisoners in Les Cayes in the days following the 2010 earthquake.

On January 19, one week after the massive earthquake, at least a dozen inmates were killed in what officials at the time called a prison break. But eyewitnesses described police firing on unarmed inmates and an independent commission found “grave violations of human rights” in the incident. The case brings into focus police accountability, prison conditions and ongoing abuses of the judicial system in Haiti.

For more, we’re joined by Brian Concannon, director at the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti.

And in other news from Haiti, a report from the Center for Economic and Policy Research says that the Organization of American States intervened in Haiti’s elections in 2010 by casting doubt on the first round votes — despite having no statistical evidence to do so. As a result, vote tally sheets were thrown out and the candidate Jude Celestin was relegated to third place while Michel Martelly advanced to second. Martelly went on to win the presidency.

See Original Post: http://fsrn.org/audio/a-test-haiti%e2%80%99s-prisons-trial-opens-2010-killing-inmates/9298

Prison conditions in Haiti are some of the world’s worst.  In this podcast Iringo gives an update on the post-earthquake conditions of Haiti’s prisons and also shares two success stories of HHRPP advocacy.

To listen to Iringo’s Podcast, click here.

To listen to more “Messages from Haiti,” click here.

Iringo Hockley holds a Mas­ters degree in Law from the Uni­ver­sity of Berne, Switzer­land and stud­ied at the Uni­ver­sity of British Colum­bia, Van­cou­ver, where she spe­cial­ized in Inter­na­tional Human Rights and Inter­na­tional Crim­i­nal Law. She taught Law at the Béné­dict School of Com­merce in Berne, worked for three and a half years as a Case Lawyer at the Swiss Fed­eral Admin­is­tra­tive Court in Berne and spent eight months work­ing for the law firm Rupp and Albi­etz in Riehen, Switzer­land.  At IJDH-BAI, she is a staff attorney who focuses on HHRPP.
Email: iringo@ijdh.org

July 21, 2011– PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Eighteen months after a devastating earthquake, life is finally getting a little better for at least one group of Haitians: prisoners.

While tens of thousands of quake survivors still live in makeshift, flood-prone shelters amid stalled efforts to clear rubble and rebuild homes, some of the impoverished country’s jails are receiving major makeovers.

The United States, Britain, Canada, the United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross have launched projects aimed at improving conditions in prisons that have been described as some of the worst in the world.

Some of the international action was already in progress prior to the January 2010 earthquake, from which the rest of the country has yet to recover. But the deplorable conditions and Haiti’s weak justice system were underscored by the quake, during which National Penitentiary prisoners set fire to their cell blocks and more than 4,200 men escaped.

Police and U.N. peacekeepers have recaptured more than 930 prisoners. Some of those still at large include alleged gang members and serious criminals.

About 70 percent of the inmates had never even been charged with a crime, however, according to the U.S. State Department’s 2010 human rights report. Because of Haiti’s corrupt and clogged judicial system, they had been held in indefinite pretrial detentions, with most prisoners languishing longer than they would have had they been sentenced for a crime.

Defendants awaiting court hearings and a verdict are confined to rat-infested, stifling-hot cells where disease is rampant. Cholera alone killed dozens of men in the National Penitentiary over the past year, said Dr. John May, a south Florida doctor who has delivered medical supplies to the penitentiary for a decade.

Overcrowding is so bad that the inmates sleep in dirty hammocks suspended from the ceiling, or resort to sleeping on the floor in shifts.

“The stronger inmates sleep all night. The weaker ones don’t,” said Riccardo Conti, chief of delegation for the ICRC, which monitors prison conditions.

Prisons have been bad in Haiti for as long as anyone can recall. Francois and Jean-Claude Duvalier, the father and son dictators who ruled Haiti for 29 years until 1986, were notorious for using the facilities’ horrific conditions to torment political opponents. Subsequent governments either had no interest in improving conditions or lacked the resources.

Many of those in lockup are accused of minor offenses that in a functioning system would get them barely any jail time at all, said Mario Leclerc, a Canadian police and prison adviser for the U.N. Development Program. “Everybody can make a mistake in their life. You know, if you are in jail for five years because you stole a goat because you were hungry or had to feed your family, I don’t think you have to stay in jail.”

In 2008, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights ordered Haiti to bring its “inhuman” prisons in line with minimum international standards within two years. The January earthquake tabled those efforts.

International aid groups revived the endeavor about six months after the quake, as they began shifting their priorities from relief to rebuilding Haiti. While home rebuilding stalled due to land disputes, a delayed election and the absence of a functioning government, the groups have had success getting jail renovation projects going.

The results are noticeable in Haiti’s National Penitentiary, whose largest wing is the Titanic block, a name derived from its hulking cement tower. The ICRC has invested $260,000 in the block to repaint filthy walls, to provide sleeping platforms for prisoners who used to fight for space on the floor and to install functioning toilets in place of overflowing buckets. It is now trying to bring clean water to inmates in other cell blocks.

“Those are significant advances,” Dr. May said.

At the northeastern edge of the capital, the Canadian government and the International Organization for Migration have nearly finished building a new, fortress-like facility that will house 750 inmates.

The new prison’s 96 cells, meant for eight people each, have twice the space of those in the National Penitentiary, which are designed for 12 but sometimes have held 80.

The U.S. has promised more than $30 million to train corrections officers. The Americans also plan to build a new women’s prison and to renovate the current women’s lockup and a jail in the seaside district of Carrefour.

The U.N. Development Program has helped train prison inspectors and set up a database to track important prisoner information. Britain has rehabilitated a detention center for minors and a jailhouse.

Human rights organizations insist much more needs to be done.

Brian Concannon, an attorney and director of the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti, which works on prison reform, said new prisons will reduce crowding, but the real solution is to tackle deficiencies in the justice system that cause overcrowding in the first place.

He said that Haiti’s high pretrial detention rate could drop if judges and prosecutors received decent wages, making them less susceptible to bribes.

Haiti’s new president, Michel Martelly, has said he wants to rebuild the justice system, along with the environment, employment and education systems. But he’s made little headway since he was sworn in two months ago. Lawmakers haven’t even approved his choice for prime minister.

Still, May sees progress. “There’s a long way to go,” he said, “but there’s a lot to be hopeful about.”

See original post: http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/americas/haitian-prisons-get-overhaul-as-rest-of-reconstruction-effort-lags/2011/07/21/gIQA4xyWSI_story.html

Au début du mois de fevrier 2011, le Doyen du Tribunal de première Instance de Hinche Me Jean Claude CETOUTE a été licencié par son ministère de Tutelle pour corruption suivant les dispositions de la lettre qu’on  lui a transmise.

Me Jean René Michel ancien Commissaire du Gouvernement démissionnaire près le parquet du Tribunal de Première Instance de Hinche a été nommé en remplacement de Me CETOUTE.  Certains députés du haut plateau central dont celui de Cerca-Carvajal Rodon A. Bien Aimé s’opposent farouchement à la prestation de serment du nouveau Doyen puisque celui-ci a été contraint de démissionner au Parquet pour des raisons que nous ignorons.

Le Doyen est l’épine dorsale du Tribunal, Il en assure l’administration, distribue les dossiers au Cabinet d’Instruction, entend les affaires urgentes (référé, habeas corpus…), fixer par ordonnance […] l’ouverture des assises criminelles sans jury bref le personnage clé pour le fonctionnement du système dans une juridiction. Fort de tout cela comment est la situation à la prison civile de Hinche ?

À l’aide des interventions du Bureau des Avocats Internationaux (BAI) par le truchement de son avocat de terrain dans le cadre du Projet HHRPP, le taux moyen de la détention préventive prolongée à Hinche était de 51 détenus [i] , aujourd’hui le nombre augmente considérablement . Sur une population carcérale de 160 détenus jusqu’à aujourd’hui  70[ii] hommes en détentions préventives.

Le nouveau chef du Parquet de Hinche Me Nesly Phelle a été consulté, dans son esprit de collaboration il a pris en compte les cas les moins graves de concert avec le substitut ayant émis le mandat de dépôt pour les libérer. Aujourd’hui deux jeunes ont bénéficié de cette intervention, il s’agit de Guelson Estiverne écroué depuis le 16 décembre ID parquet 316/2010 et Jean Gauthier écroué le 18 janvier ID parquet 352/2010.

Aussi n’est il pas important de faire remarquer que légions sont les détenus qui ont été jugés et que leur dossier à la prison ne contient pas l’ordre de condamnation ou encore le juge est au délibéré après le délai requis par la loi. Nous nous donnons la peine d’intervenir pour apporter un élément de solution.

Le Tribunal de Première Instance de Hinche est comme un troupeau sans Berger. Le greffe dudit Tribunal est débordé avec le nombre de réquisitoire d’informer émis par le parquet et que le doyen est le seul personnage légalement constitué à distribuer ces dossiers au Cabinet d’Instruction. Jusqu’à quand cette irrégularité sera normalisée ? Doit-on attendre l’avènement du gouvernement pour la nomination d’un nouveau Doyen à Hinche ?  De l’avis des professionnels du Droit dans la communauté hinchoise il faut que tous les acteurs œuvrant dans la cause des démunis en général et des prisonniers en particulier élèvent la voix pour tirer la sonnette d’alarme de manière à jusqu’à perforer les tympans des autorités constituées.

Hinche le 30 mars 2011

Me Ouvens Jean Louis

Avocat stagiaire au Barreau de Hinche

Assistant Légal attaché à la prison de Hinche

Projet HHRPP/BAI

[ii] Statistique de la prison de Hinche mercredi 30 mars 2011

http://ijdh.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/prob-doyen.docx