Haitians abroad hold no rights in the country they send money to

States answer their emigrants in three ways. Italy, France, Croatia and Portugal grant full membership, which means citizens abroad vote in national elections and elect their own members of parliament. Mexico grants a limited set of rights. Haiti, as of 2016, granted no membership at all, so a Haitian who lives permanently outside the country holds no citizenship rights in it. The demand usually comes from diaspora organisations and their leaders, who argue that recognition would increase what they already put into the homeland economy through hometown associations, business investment and lobbying. Parliaments then decide what form of membership to grant and what constitutional change it requires. The Haitian case is the hard one because the flow of money runs one way in large volume while the flow of rights does not run at all.

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.

Anyone taught anything about the Caribbean before Columbus was probably taught two peoples: the gentle Arawak, who were wiped out, and the fierce Carib, who ate them. James Michener sold the pair to millions of readers and early archaeology supplied the labels. William Keegan and Corinne Hofman argue that the division is a filing system rather than a finding. The islands held enormous variety in language, settlement, craft and politics, and communities built shifting alliances across water in ways a two tribe scheme cannot hold. The excavated record shows no series of clean displacements in which one people replaces another. It shows a kaleidoscope, their word, of movement and mixture, with goods, techniques, styles and people crossing between the islands and to and from the mainland for thousands of years. This matters for Haiti. The island that became Saint-Domingue is usually granted a single indigenous population that vanished, which is an easier story to tell than the one the sites support.

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.