Armed bandits now control Haiti’s largest courthouse after violent takeover
It was just another day inside Haiti’s sometimes functional, sometimes chaotic court system.
In one courtroom, six jailed defendants, including the most recent head of the National Penitentiary, were being questioned about a scheme in which defendants were accused of cashing the paychecks of cops who had long since abandoned their posts. Elsewhere, members of the Haiti National Police were trying to figure out how to load an oversized safe stuffed with sensitive records onto a vehicle to transport it to a safer location.
And then a notorious gang decided to take over the courthouse.
Over the course of two hours last Friday, courthouse employees, lawyers and government prosecutors were subjected to a barrage of bullets from the heavily armed gang known as “5 segonn” — Five Seconds.
They seized control of the courthouse and haven’t given it back one week later.
The brazen attack, which left at least one person wounded and part of the courthouse reportedly in flames, is the latest challenge to the government and the international community as gangs continue their takeover of the country. It is also the latest act of unbridled banditry in the crisis-racked country that was unraveling even before last year’s assassination of President Jovenel Moïse.
Many fear the nation is on the brink of anarchy.
“Imagine driving by a public building in your community where armed thugs are now openly sitting on the stairs of a deserted courthouse in close vicinity of a police precinct filled with out-gunned policemen,” said Bernard Gousse, a former justice minister and one of the Caribbean nation’s leading law experts.
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The gang attack erupted on the same day that members of the United Nations Security Council in New York received U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres’ latest report on the dire situation in Haiti. Due to the timing, there is no mention of the takeover of the courthouse, which includes the Court of First Instance of Port-au-Prince. However, Guterres highlighted recent food, water and medicine shortages in the overcrowded prison system and the paralysis of the judiciary, among other concerns.
“The Haitian judicial system continues to be plagued by corruption, insufficient resources and a lack of political will, all of which have helped to bring judicial proceedings to a standstill,” he wrote, while advocating for the “timely entry into force” of the country’s new controversial penal and criminal procedure codes, scheduled to become effective June 24.
“It is essential that all of the country’s courts resume their proper functioning,” the report said.
“They have taken the justice palace hostage,” said Ainé Martin, who heads the national court clerks association.
Currently under the gang’s control: the offices of the Dean of the Civil Court of Port-au-Prince, who is also president of the court and assigns judges to cases; those of 28 investigating judges and 18 acting prosecutors; and the office of the chief government prosecutor responsible for applying Haiti’s criminal code. Also: court archives, the courthouse library and certain offices of the Court of Appeal of Port-au-Prince.
Martin said he was inside when the attack started.
“Everyone came running inside saying armed men are surrounding us. No one knew what to do,” he said. “Judges and lawyers started climbing a wall to get out.”
Police sent two armored vehicles to evacuate other employees, which they managed to do even while their forces lost a gun battle with the heavily armed gang. Martin said he managed to get to his car and took off in the direction of the port authority. He said the gang, which is lodged next door in the Village de Dieu or City of God slum, had been spying on the courthouse for awhile, using drones and video cameras.
The building was a storehouse of criminal complaints; marriage, birth and death certificates; land titles, surveys and contracts.
After seeing smoke coming from the courthouse, many fear that some — if not all — of those documents have been set ablaze.
“Today everyone who is in the jurisdiction of Port-au-Prince is a victim of what’s happening here,” Martin said, noting that the gang has also taken several safes where evidence and other documents are kept.
The safes, he said, were taken into the gang’s stronghold, a notorious kidnapping lair where five police officers were killed last March during a botched anti-gang operation by specialized forces. The officers’ bodies have never been recovered.
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Since 2018, the clerk of courts and prosecution offices have been subjected to one burglary after another, with the most recent break-in occurring just days before the gang attack. Lawyers, judges and clerks have all complained that kidnappings and gang violence in the vicinity of the justice palace present a serious threat.
In April, lawyers’ unions protested what they perceived to be a lack of action on the part of national authorities to protect at-risk justice workers. They were ignored along with long-standing requests to relocate the courthouse.
As Martin spoke, Haiti was hit with another sad reminder of the country’s lawlessness. Images of a vehicle belonging to Robert Médard, head of traffic in Croix-des-Bouquets and Haiti National Police inspector, began circulating on WhatsApp. Médard, whose rank is the equivalent of a lieutenant in the United States, was covered in blood and slouched over in the seat of his vehicle. He had been riddled with bullets by armed individuals at Carrefour Marassa, just north of the capital.
Haiti National Police spokesman Garry Desrosiers said Médard, who was in his police uniform but traveling in his private vehicle, appeared to have come across a kidnapping attempt when unknown individuals opened fire. Another officer in the vehicle was wounded.
The Port-au-Prince human rights watchdog group Fondasyon Je Klere, or Eyes Wide Open Foundation, said the attack on the courthouse, once the headquarters of the U.S. Agency for International Development, was just the latest siege by gangs in the capital.
Weeks earlier, gangs had taken possession of the Center for Planning Techniques and of Applied Economics or CTPEA, a specialized school on Harry Truman Boulevard next to the courthouse that is under the planning ministry and gives the equivalent of master’s degrees in planning and development.
“All of yesterday the bandits had control of the courthouse and the CTPEA, and the government didn’t do anything; not even a report,” said Yolène Gilles, a human rights activist. “This shows that there is no political will to establish rule of law in the country, so now the space that occupies the courthouse is going to be the space where the bandits are going to kidnap people, torture and hold them. It’s going to turn into a gang hideout.”
Fondasyon Je Klere, or FJK, described a scene of mayhem on Friday where magistrates, lawyers, employees in the Public Prosecutor’s Office of Port-au-Prince, defendants and litigants were forced to dodge bullets and save themselves by climbing the walls.
Its initial investigation, the group said, shows that at least one person was injured after being shot and seven vehicles were stolen.
The gang members were also observed carrying away computers, desks, chairs and air conditioners that had been installed in the judges’ already bare-bones offices.
“On Monday,” the report said, “one could notice the furniture that had once adorned the Port-au-Prince Courthouse was on display for sale on the rue du Champs de Mars in full view of all.”
The report makes note of the presence of the former prison director and his fellow defendants inside the courthouse at the time of the attack, but said it could not say if the gang attack was connected to their questioning on the check-cashing allegations.
Guterres, in presenting his report on the situation in Haiti to members of the Security Council last week, said: “In an environment rife with impunity and corruption, the paralysis of the justice sector, including the prison administration, is devastating.”
This story was originally published June 16, 2022 at 1:52 PM.
