Ashcroft rules that a Haitian asylum seeker stays locked up

In April 2003 the attorney general of the United States, John Ashcroft, ruled that an illegal immigrant who posed no threat to national security could still be detained indefinitely rather than released on bond, so long as he fell into what was termed a security threat category. The case was that of David Joseph, one of hundreds of Haitians who had applied for asylum. An appellate panel of immigration judges had granted him release on bail while his claim was decided. Ashcroft overruled the panel, acting under the sign of the Department of Homeland Security, and held that Joseph's individual qualities and circumstances no longer mattered. The reason he gave was the threat of unlawful and dangerous mass migrations by sea. The ruling followed a decision taken after 11 September 2002 to place every non Cuban asylum seeker arriving by sea in mandatory detention with expedited removal proceedings.

On 5 February 2004 the FLRN seized Gonaives, the town where independence had been proclaimed two hundred years and one month before. Cap-Haitien fell on 22 February. By the end of the month the rebels stood at the edge of Port-au-Prince. Aristide resigned on 29 February and left the country, saying afterward that the American ambassador James Foley had forced the resignation and that he had been carried off against his will. Washington called it a rescue. Supreme Court Justice Boniface Alexandre became interim president and invited American, French and Canadian troops in to hold the capital. In March the United Nations authorised MINUSTAH, a peacekeeping force under Brazilian command that stayed thirteen years. Aristide settled in Pretoria. Whether his removal corrected a democracy or interrupted one has never been agreed, and the argument has the shape of most arguments about Haitian sovereignty, with Haitians on both sides of it and foreign governments holding the aircraft.

From 1929 the Dominican Republic gave citizenship to anyone born on its soil unless the parents were in transit, a phrase that covered the children of diplomats and of people in the country for ten days or less. In 2004 the General Law on Migration, numbered 285-04, added temporary foreign workers, migrants whose residence permits had expired, people brought in without authorisation and anyone unable to prove lawful residence. Since almost all the workers recruited for the cane fields were Haitian, the new categories caught Haitian families more than any other group. Registry offices had been refusing birth certificates to children of Haitian parents informally for years, a practice well documented by the 1990s and fought by Dominican civil society. After 2004 the refusals had a law behind them, and the children of people who had cut cane for decades were treated as though they had just crossed the border.

After independence most African governments put money into schools, primary enrolment rose sharply, and there was deliberate effort to get girls into classrooms. The gains were uneven and then partly reversed. Adult illiteracy south of the Sahara is higher than in any other region of the world, the economic crisis that began in the 1970s cut state education budgets, and the gap between boys and girls is widest in the countryside. Health followed a similar curve. Malaria remains the heaviest disease burden on the continent and sleeping sickness was spreading again by the 1990s. More than two thirds of the world's HIV cases are African, with about 34 million people infected since the early 1980s and over 11 million dead, concentrated in the east and the south. Illness tracks poverty, thin food, bad sanitation and dirty water. Clinics decayed and trained staff left for better pay abroad. Vaccination programmes still cut infant mortality sharply after the 1960s and life expectancy rose, which shows what small sums can buy.