The current state of the international police force poised to be deployed to Haiti to assist the island nation amid one of its worst political and social crises in decades is currently in limbo.
Kenya’s highest court has dealt a blow to the international community’s attempts to deploy a militarized police force to Haiti. In a January 26 decision, the court barred the deployment of 1,000 police officers as part of the United Nations-backed force to combat rampant gang violence.
Judge Enock Chacha Mwita ruled, “Any decision by any state organ or state officer to deploy police officers to Haiti . . . contravenes the [Kenyan] constitution and the law and is therefore unconstitutional, illegal, and invalid.”
“An order is hereby issued prohibiting deployment of police forces to Haiti or any other country,” he said.
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Kenya’s President William Ruto, October 2014.
Despite this decision, Kenya’s President William Ruto announced that the mission will continue to move ahead, saying, “That mission can go ahead as soon as next week, if all the paperwork is done between Kenya and Haiti on the bilateral route that has been suggested by the court.”
The United Nations Security Council approved the creation and deployment of the Kenyan-led police force in October 2023, with thirteen of the fifteen permanent members of the council, including the United States, voting to create a U.S.-funded peacekeeping police force. Kenya’s cabinet and its parliament had both approved the deployment of police officers before Kenya’s High Court struck down the plan as illegal.
According to the Associated Press quoting Kenyan officials, the first 300 police officers were set to begin deploying to Haiti in February 2024. The number of Kenyan police would eventually increase to 1,000, representing one-third of the 3,000 police officers in the multinational force.
Other countries that have agreed to send police officers to Haiti include Burundi, Chad, Senegal, Jamaica, and Belize. However, there is skepticism from Haitians that the multinational deployment will be able to resolve the crisis facing Haiti.
“A multinational force will not be able to resolve the problem without resolving the political crisis and the problems of corruption, impunity, and the absence of the rule of law,” Pierre Esperance, executive director of the National Human Rights Defense Network in Haiti, tells The Progressive. “It doesn’t mean that the police do not need any assistance. Of course they need assistance. But the international force will not solve our political instability and impunity.”
Haiti has seen an unprecedented political crisis following the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse on July 7, 2021, and a subsequent surge in gang violence.
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Haitian President Jovenel Moïse in May 2018. Moïse was assassinated July 7, 2021.
“The situation was bad under the administration of Jovenel Moïse, but it is getting far worse under the administration of [Prime Minister] Ariel Henry,” Esperance says. “[Henry] has put our country in a situation we have never faced before.”
The U.N.-backed peacekeeping force had faced criticism, with some analysts like Nicole Phillips, an adjunct professor of law at the University of California College of the Law, San Francisco, and expert on Haiti, saying that the force would likely not work.
“This is bad politics,” she told The Progressive in November 2023. “[The international community] knows they’re supporting a de facto illegitimate government that is implicated in the assassination of the former president.”
While Prime Minister Henry has continued to receive support from the international community, especially the Biden Administration, the country has continued to fail to hold presidential elections in the years following the assassination of Moïse, citing the worsening security situation as the reason.
“A multinational force will not be able to resolve the problem without resolving the political crisis and the problems of corruption, impunity, and the absence of the rule of law.—Pierre Esperance
In January 2023 the terms of the majority of senators in the Haitian Parliament lapsed, leaving only eleven senators to pass legislation. But in February 2023, the prime minister formed an electoral body that would oversee the pending elections.
Insecurity has steadily worsened in Haiti since 2021.
It is estimated that the approximately 300 gangs that operate in Haiti now control about 80 percent of Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince. These groups reportedly killed more than 4,000 people in 2023 and carried out thousands more kidnappings, generating terror across the country.
“There is no place where you are safe,” Esperance says, “because of the power of the gangs and because of the lack of action by authorities.”
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Crowd surges at a check point in Carrefour, Haiti, February 2010.
According to Esperance, the way out of the crisis is a Haitian-led political agreement to fight against impunity and corruption in the country, an end to government support for the gangs, and a return to democracy. He suggests these actions need to occur alongside any efforts by a multinational force.
“The international support needs to listen to the Haitian people and listen to civil society,” Esperance says. “They need to support our democracy and not continue to support the political officials who are involved in human rights violations.”