Haitian children only the start

JAMAICA’S DECISION to allow the Mustard Seed Communities to take 59 disabled Haitian children and their minders into its care is a positive development in the wake of the Government’s hitherto haphazard application of its refugee policy.

Hopefully, the decision marks a shift to a principled treatment of Haitian asylum seekers, which should begin with giving the children indefinite residency in the island, with a clear track to citizenship, instead of the initial three-year stay they were granted.

Additionally, the Holness administration should formally rescind its denial, issued earlier this month, of refugee status to 37 Haitians. If they have not yet been deported, their expulsion should be stayed.

The Government must also commit to transparency in its dealing with future Haitian asylum-seekers, including how it communicates with them.

Founded by Roman Catholic priest, Monsignor Gregory Ramkissoon, Mustard Seed Communities is an international organisation operating in the Global South that provides care to people with disabilities. It has several homes, including for children, in Jamaica.

In that regard, Mustard Seed was well placed to offer support to the organisation, HaitiChildren, whose home for disabled children was undermined by the security crisis in which the authority of the Haitian state teeters at the brink and criminal gangs are in large swathes of the country.

DIED

Indeed, during the period before they left for Jamaica last week, some wards at the HaitiChildren home died for want of medical care, in part because of the collapse of Haiti’s already-weak medical services. Further, on the day the children were leaving the HaitiChildren facility, they were threatened by gangs who shook down their caregivers for all the money they had.

The security situation in Haiti is not new, and nor is its impact unique to disabled children and their carers. Indeed, an appalling circumstance was gravely exacerbated by the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse, leading to the ascendancy of the gangs in Haiti’s power structure.

Gangs have killed nearly 5,000 people and caused the displacement of more than 300,000 others. Over a million Haitians, or about nine per cent of the population, are on the brink of starvation, or are food-insecure.

That is the backdrop against which more than 120 Haitians have arrived by boat in Jamaica over the last eight months and quickly hustled out of the island, mostly after what appeared to be shotgun legal processes. They are quickly rounded up, taken before parish judges for illegal entry and, having been found guilty, bundled on to Jamaica Defence Force Coast Guard vessels for the trip home and uncertain survival.

A group of 37 of the would-be refugees might have felt that they had escaped this fate. Last August, they were found guilty of illegally entering Jamaica and were slated to be sent home, until the government was embarrassed by the rights group Freedom Imaginaries to follow its own policy on asylum0seekers. The group was allowed to apply for refugee status.

In the face of the outcry by Freedom Imaginaries, the national security minister, Horace Chang, visited the Haitians and told them, “You are our friends. We welcome Haitians. We will look after you.”

However, in early March the Haitians were informed that their applications were rejected and that they would be deported.

IRREGULAR PROCESS

Freedom Imaginaries, however, complained that the process was largely irregular. In many instances, it said, applicants were not “allowed to access an asylum procedure or communicate with legal counsel”.

They were also denied other basic information and procedures “such as the composition of the (Asylum) Committee, the Committee’s recommendation to the MNS (Ministry of National Security), and the documentation that informed the decision”.

Clearly, Haiti has all the conditions that apply to states whose citizens’ application for refugee status must be taken seriously. Moreover, Jamaica has recognised that Haiti has a deep political and security crisis that places the lives of large numbers of its citizens at risk.

Indeed, Prime Minister Andrew Holness is part of regional and international efforts to mobilise a policing group to stabilise Haiti’s security situation. A former Jamaican prime minister, Bruce Golding, is part of the Caribbean Community Eminent Persons Group that helped craft the interim power-sharing strategy, to which most Haiti political groups have signed up.

The decision on the disabled children, this newspaper therefore hopes, signals a broad Jamaican acceptance of its humanitarian obligations to the people of Haiti – and, indeed, its responsibilities under international humanitarian law.