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20 October 2004

Further Information on UA 149/04 issued 20 April 2004 Fear for safety/death threats

HAITI

Rénan Hédouville (m), Secretary-General of the Comité des Avocats pour le Respect des Libertés Individuelles (CARLI), Lawyers' Committee for the Respect of Individual Liberties

Marie Nadia Charles (f), Executive Director

Morisseau Jean Rony (m), Lawyer

Other members of CARLI

Carline Séide (f)

New name: Mario Joseph (m), lawyer

Lawyers Rénan Hédouville and Mario Joseph, who have worked on behalf of people who suffered human rights abuses at the hands of the army while Haiti was under military rule, have been receiving numerous anonymous telephone death threats. Amnesty International believes both men's lives are in danger. M. Hédouville has reported the threats repeatedly to the media and the authorities, but nothing has been done to protect him.

Rénan Hédouville is Secretary-General of the Comité des Avocats pour le Respect des Libertés Individuelles (CARLI), Lawyers' Committee for the Respect of Individual Liberties. He has been told that he will be killed unless he stops his work of defending human rights and accusing former army officers of human rights violations. He and other CARLI members are being targeted in an attempt to hinder their human rights work.

CARLI is an active human rights organization that documents and investigates human rights violations via a telephone "hotline". In August 2004 it protested publicly after a jury acquitted former paramilitary leader Louis Jodel-Chamblain and senior ex-military police officer Jackson Joanis of the September 1993 murder of pro-democracy activist Antoine Izméry. Izméry had been a prominent supporter of former president Aristide.

Mario Joseph is representing prominent supporters of ex-president Aristide's Famille Lavalas party, who have recently been imprisoned without charge. He has received numerous death threats because of this. As a lawyer working for the Bureau des Avocats Internationaux (BAI), International Lawyers Office, he defended and assisted victims of human rights abuses committed under the military government of 1991 to 1994, notably parents of victims of the April 1994 Raboteau massacre, a joint military and paramilitary operation attack on a shanty town where support for Aristide was strong, in which an estimated 20 people were killed.

There is no further news of Carline Séide, the young woman whose case was taken up by CARLI after she was gang-raped by seven men in November 2003. One of the attackers was alleged to have been a policeman. He was later arrested, but escaped from jail. Men who claimed to be sent by him had harassed and threatened Carline, who went into hiding, and members of CARLI.

BACKGROUND INFORMATION

Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the first democratically elected president of Haiti, was overthrown in a 1991 coup by former military leaders. Thousands of his supporters were murdered over the three years of military rule that ended with US military intervention in 1994, that restored Aristide to power. He was re-elected in 2000.

In February 2004, after months of unrest and demonstrations, conflict broke out in the country’s fourth largest town, Gonaïves, when armed opponents of the government and former soldiers led by Louis Jodel-Chamblain attacked police stations and courthouses, forcing the police and local authorities to flee. The conflict spread throughout the country and Aristide left the country in disputed circumstances. A transitional government was formed in early March, but the atmosphere of lawlessness that followed Aristide's departure remains.