Dominican Republic and Haiti: Country Studies

Dominican Republic and Haiti: Country Studies
were scheduled to be withdrawn in January 2000, to be
replaced by reserve and National Guard forces on short assignments
to continue medical programs and engineering projects.
The UN was also responsible for some 900 police trainers
from more than twenty countries, who assisted in the formation
and professionalization of the PNH. This multinational
mentoring and training force had been reduced to 290 civilian
police specialists from eleven countries by 1998, of whom
twenty-three were detached from the Royal Canadian Mounted
Police and from local police forces in Canada, thirty from the
United States, many of them of Haitian origin, and thirty-five
from France. Argentina supplied 140 federal police to provide
security for the police trainers. The training mandate was
scheduled to expire March 15, 2000, with a follow-up technical
support program planned.
Justice System
Haiti's legal system reflects its colonial origins. It has a
French structure superimposed on a traditional African-Caribbean
society and thus lacks the parallel or indigenous legal system
often found in modern Africa. The civil law system is based
on the Napoleonic Code. The Criminal Code dates from 1832
(see Governmental Institutions, ch. 9).
For nearly 200 years, the justice system has been noted for its
rampant corruption. Most crimes go unsolved and unpunished.
The Duvalier dictatorships and the military regimes that
followed left a judicial system that was barely functioning. The
best judges and lawyers fled the country, in some cases to serve
as judicial officials of newly independent francophone African
states.
The OAS/UN International Civilian Mission to Haiti delivered
a devastating indictment of the judicial system after the
monitors had completed a study of the system's most pressing
weaknesses in 1993 while the military was still in power. Their
report found that judges, prosecutors, and lawyers had been
threatened, beaten, and killed for attempting to follow the rule
of law. Judges and prosecutors were afraid even to investigate
cases involving the military, the attaches, or their supporters.
Corruption and extortion permeated every level of the judicial
system. Despite the requirement that justices of the peace have
a law degree and complete a minimum one-year probationary
period, many justices of the peace did not know how to read
and write. People viewed the court system with contempt and
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