Three political prisoners freed in Haiti

Human rights activists and Haiti’s pro-democracy populace are cheering about the fact that three political prisoners have been released in Port-au-Prince. On Easter weekend, Judge Mimose Janvier, the investigating magistrate in the cases of Mario Exilhomme, Harold Sévère and Anthony Nazaire, ordered the three to be freed, saying that no evidence had been produced to indicate they committed a crime. Exilhomme had been illegally imprisoned for 10 months while Nazaire and Sévère had been held without charge since March 2004.

Exilhomme is a grassroots pro-democracy activist. At the request of the Haitian Ministry of Justice, he was arrested in the Dominican Republic, where he was staying legally, and extradited to Haiti on July 22, 2005. He was never charged with a crime, and prosecutors never produced any evidence of wrongdoing

Harold Sévère , the former mayor of Port-au-Prince, was one of those freed. Sévère was arrested March 14, 2004, but was never charged with a crime. Anthony Nazaire, a former officer in the National Palace Security Unit, was arrested the same day.

On Dec. 23, 2004, a judge, recognizing that the government had produced no evidence against them, ordered Harold Sévère and Anthony Nazaire to be freed on their own recognizance. The prosecutor even agreed to execute the order but was overridden by an illegal order from the minister of justice, says attorney Mario Joseph of the human rights organization Bureau des Avocats Internationaux in Port-au-Prince.

On Dec. 30, 2004, former Justice Minister Bernard Gousse sent a letter to the chief judge of the Port-au-Prince trial court, ordering him to remove all the case files in the possession of Investigating Magistrates Jean Sénat Fleury and Brédy Fabien. This came days after Judge Fleury ordering the liberation of Fr. Gérard Jean-Juste, a pro-democracy activist, and Judge Fabien ordered the provisional release of Sévère and Nazaire, says Joseph.

No one knows how many political prisoners there are in Haiti, says American attorney Brian Concannon of the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti. “Prison authorities routinely limit human rights groups’ access to prison records. But we know that 90 percent of the total prison population has not been convicted of a crime and that some were engaged in political activity before their arrest.” More than 2,000 people are currently imprisoned in Port-au-Prince.

As political prisoners languish in prisons and police stations across Haiti, three police officers implicated in a bloody massacre at a USAID-sponsored soccer tournament last August have been released from prison. On April 17, by order of Judge Jean Péreste Paul, Inspector Renan Etienne, who served as the director of the Central Police Administration and reportedly had close ties to the rebels who staged the 2004 coup, was released along with three other officers. Speaking on Radio Caraïbes Monday afternoon, a spokesperson for released police officers said that they did nothing wrong and expected to be fully cleared of any criminal acts in the August 2005 incident.