Empower Future Haitian Lawyers: Meet Dina Cajuste
Today we are inviting our community to stand with us as monthly donors, ensuring that the fight for human rights in Haiti continues for the crucial months ahead.
Meet Dina Cajuste
We would love for you to meet Dina Cajuste, who is well on her way to becoming a lawyer despite the obstacles placed by the corrupt status quo to exclude her.
Dina is a courageous, idealistic law school graduate in the Lawyer Training Program at the Bureau des Avocats Internationaux (BAI), which helps people from disadvantaged backgrounds surmount the obstacles to a legal career. Those obstacles were intentionally set up by Haiti’s corrupt, elitist system to keep people like Dina away from a lawyer’s power to challenge the injustice that keeps a tiny minority of Haitians wealthy and the vast majority poor and vulnerable.
Dina understands structural injustice. She grew up in modest circumstances in Carrefour Feuilles, a neighborhood now overrun with gangs, and faced the devastating loss of her mother at age four. She was bothered early on by poverty, and that “little girls always do the work in the house, and little boys are always playing.” Dina knew she had to change things, and believed that she could best do so as a lawyer. Through talent and perseverance, Dina graduated from Haiti’s State Law School.
But talent and perseverance are not enough: over 90% of all law graduates in Haiti never practice law. Haiti’s unjust justice system has long kept people like Dina out through burdensome requirements that are extremely difficult for graduates who do not come from privilege.
With BAI support, Dina finished her thesis (during a year in which she had to flee her home from advancing gang violence, and suffered serious injury when she was struck by a car). This summer, she successfully defended it.
Help Build the Next Generation of Human Rights Defenders in Haiti
Dina is well on her way to fully qualifying as a lawyer and years of putting her talent, perseverance and training to use fighting injustice. Dina summarized it so well when she told us, “At BAI, I have started to understand what it is like to be a lawyer – the daily battle that a lawyer wages on behalf of the citizens.”
You can join Dina’s daily battle by becoming a monthly donor to IJDH, providing the essential financial support BAI needs to train more justice champions like Dina who will fight for the stability and democracy that Haitians deserve.
Your recurring donation will be a driving force in IJDH’s work to defend human rights for years to come. Thank you for joining us in the fight for justice and democracy in Haiti.