Law & Justice

BYLINE: Reuters DATELINE: PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti, Nov. 3 BODY: A judge said Friday that he had ordered a top Haitian police chief arrested on suspicion of conspiring with kidnappers. Judge Napela Saintil said a warrant for the arrest of the chief, Inspector General Michael Lucius, was now in the hands of a prosecutor because he had ignored a summons. Mr. Lucius, barred from leaving Haiti, is in charge of units fighting organized crime and is the lead officer in the fight against kidnapping, drugs and gangs. He has denied accusations of having ties to kidnappers. ”I am ready to appear before a judge, but not Napela Saintil because he is biased against me,” he said. Mr. Lucius has not gone into hiding and travels around Port-au-Prince surrounded by police guards. Haiti’s police force is riddled with corruption and poorly equipped. Several […]

BY Alfonso Chardy, Miami Herald March 31,  2006 Every year Carl Dorelien looked forward to May 15. That’s when the Florida Lottery paid his annual $159,000 installment from a $3.2 million Lotto jackpot the won in 1997. But he’s no longer getting the money. A state judge has frozen Dorelien’s winnings in connection with a lawsuit from the Center for Justice & Accountability, a San Francisco-based human rights organization that targets foreign-born torture suspects who live or have lived in the United States. Dorelien, a former Haitian army colonel, was deported in 2003 after an immigration judge found him to be a human rights violator. He was the highest-ranking military officer expelled from the United States since former Argentine Gen. Carlos Guillermo Suárez Masón was extradited in 1988. Now the Dorelien case is back in federal court in Miami, which will determine later this year whether he’s liable for the 1994 […]

Hastings Human Rights Project for Haiti April 29, 2005   Click HERE to see the PDF version