The Truth and Justice Commission in Haiti - Forgotten Recommendations, Living Demands

This paper examines the implementation of recommendations set forth by the Haitian truth commission in 1996. In its final report, the truth commission uncovered human rights abuses committed during a de facto military regime following a coup d’état in 1991. The recommendations set forth aimed at reforming the Haitian justice system, covering issues from reparation to victims and sexual violence against women, to reform of judicial institutions and law reform. Although no overall justice reform has taken place in Haiti, this paper nonetheless finds a high rate of implementation by tracing the recommendations. A pattern emerges in the record of implementation, where implemented recommendations were either 1) linked to on-going processes, 2) stated by the constitution of 1987, or 3) backed by international actors and trends. Further, this study of the Haitian truth commission raise several interesting aspects for the larger debate on implementation of recommendations, namely 1) the question of causality: which measures were implemented due to these recommendations, and which would have happened anyway, and 2) the complexity due to time and actors: the 20 years since the report was finalised and the wide range of actors operating on the Haitian scene makes the ‘record of implementation’ highly complex. Still, the overall claim of this paper is that even though the report itself is largely forgotten, the demands that it vocalised through its recommendations are still alive, with the same struggles and tentative reforms going on today.