An appeal court rules that crimes against humanity belong to Haitian law

The investigating judge in the Duvalier case set the crimes against humanity aside and sent the former president for life to the correctional tribunal for embezzlement of public funds. He claimed the question of crimes against humanity had never been put to him, which the prosecutor's own orders contradicted. He took no investigative step against the co-accused the prosecutor had named. The plaintiffs appealed. In February 2014 the court of appeal of Port-au-Prince overturned that decision. It held that the notion of crime against humanity forms part of international custom, that international custom forms part of Haitian domestic law, that the acts charged were crimes against humanity and were imprescriptible by their continuing character, and that serious evidence pointed to the responsibility of the accused for failing to prevent the crimes or punish those who committed them. It ordered every co-accused, plaintiff and witness named by the prosecution to be heard.

Juliana Deguis Pierre was born in the Dominican Republic in 1984. Her parents lived and worked on a sugar plantation and neither had legal residence, and under the law of the time she was issued a birth certificate. In 2008, aged twenty four, she went to an office to request her cedula, the national identity card. The staff refused it and cancelled her birth certificate on the ground that both her parents carried Haitian surnames. In 2013 the new Constitutional Court took her appeal as one of its first cases and ruled that she had never been entitled to citizenship at all, that everyone in the same position should lose theirs, and that the records of people registered as Dominican between 1929 and 2007 should be audited and moved into the register for foreigners. The court also ordered the government to produce a plan within ninety days for migrants without papers.

Johnson assembled fifteen printed world history textbooks with editions published across a five year window, gathering the information through scholars on social media. One contained no mention of the Haitian Revolution at all, three gave it less than a page, and four gave it four pages or more, which she reads as an overall increase in space since the earlier survey. Her more pointed finding concerns who writes these books. Only three had authors specialising in any aspect of Latin American history and only five had authors whose research concentrates on African history, while the largest group of contributors specialised in Asian history. She notes that many authors came from elite institutions and that several were late in their careers or had died since a first edition, and argues that early career scholars at teaching-focused institutions are largely absent.

Windward and Leeward are administrative terms European powers applied to the Lesser Antilles in the seventeenth century, and the boundary between them was drawn to suit shipping and colonial jurisdiction. Colonial usage puts the divide at Dominica. Many archaeologists put it at Guadeloupe and count northward from there. The disagreement is small and it exposes something larger. These names were never meant to describe how the islands were inhabited before Europeans arrived, and the societies living there were organised around canoe routes, marriage, exchange and language, none of which respect a line drawn for administrative convenience. Using the colonial vocabulary makes island groups look separate and fixed where the evidence shows movement and mixing along the whole chain. Keegan and Hofman argue for an archipelagic view instead, treating the sea as the thing that joined people rather than the thing that divided them. The map you are handed decides in advance what you can see.