Clintons' earthquake mass incarceration unit in Haiti - A women's prison, inaugurated and unfinished Feb. 2016
Photo Credit - Alain Armand/Twitter

Blast from the past- Èzili Dantò's paper on Judicial Reform for Haiti in 1995

The Forces Against the Development of An Independent Judiciary in Haiti by Èzili Dantò, September 1995

The HLLN 1995 Haiti Judicial Reform position paper is copied in pdf form below.

I was recently re-reading this position paper I wrote 21-years ago as a young lawyer. It was in 1994-1995. (My name then was a French colonized person's name, Marguerite Laurent. Only family and art colleagues called me Èzili back then.)

It was the year I founded the Haitian Lawyers Leadership Network to institutionalized the rule of law in Haiti and to protect the civil, economic, human and cultural rights of Haitians living at home and abroad.

That year in Haiti I was an attorney for the first democratically elected Haitian president, Jean Bertrand Aristide and, for important reasons I won't go into right now, I was working at the Ministry of Justice as the Coordinator of Donor Funds for Judicial Reform Projects.

Lifetimes have gone by.

Read the paper and see part of that journey and how disturbing it is for me to write this last position statement for HLLN where HLLN strongly denounces the disputed Parliament and this masquerade of a provisional president. Many will also recall the tireless efforts of HLLN, from 2004 to 2006 to get then Minister Jocelerme Privert and other Lavalas officials illegally imprisoned, released. (See, Martelly Leaves in Disgraced: US Intransigent Colonial Forces in Haiti Maneuver to Still Count the Fraudulent 2015 Elections.)

In 1995, HLLN and I were kicked out of Haiti by the U.S. ambassador to Haiti for, what the person who was there and who just sent me this 21-year old position paper, says was my " clarity of vision and grasp and knowledge of geopolitics" that I'd exposed while in Haiti.

The position paper I wrote back then for HLLN expressed the details of my experiences in Haiti in 1994-1995. I was reviled then by the status quo for standing against the injustices metered out to Lavalas Movement militants.

Back then, as now a hit was put on my life. I always feel them when they're close. But back then, Empire and their coup d'etat bullets riddled the hotel room I was supposed to be in. I haven't spoken much about this in two decades. Moreover, 22-years ago, as today, my knowledge of geopolitics balanced with Haiti art, spirituality, dance and life unnerved the powers-that-be. I do feel my time on this battlefield coming to an end. If for nothing else than the sheer boredom of Empire's template and the educated Haitians constantly letting themselves get played. This is not what I came to witness.

I share the paper written in 1995 because it's timely. You'll notice what's changed and stayed the same.

Ironically, I naively presented it at a Brookings Institute event on Haiti held in Puerto Rico. They were not welcoming.

This is a draft, but the corrected original wasn't much different. I have it somewhere in storage boxes. Just as I have, somewhere in a storage box, the letter that was drafted by the current UN MINUSTAH deputy director, "Brotherman DOJ" Carl Alexander (- then also a member of HLLN who I didn't suspect of malfeasance until it was too late).

I am told he drafted it for the signature of the then US Ambassador to Haiti, Larry Swing, kicking me out of Haiti to put the Chemonic ilks in as judicial reformer. (See, SELF-DEFENSE IS THE ART OF DODGING.)

(P.S. Some of you Haitians who have followed HLLN since 1994 and who where there, and have access to that old Larry Swing letter to Justice Minister Exume, send it over so I may share it with the Èzili Network. That will save me some work digging it up from storage. Thank you in advance.)

Èzili Dantò,
Haitian Lawyers Leadership Network/Free Haiti
February 17, 2016