Overview:
An open letter despatched on Aug. 7 to incoming Presidential Transitional Council president Laurent Saint-Cyr requires pressing motion to guard and promote the rights of Haitian girls and women. Signed by over 30 Haitian and worldwide organizations, the letter urges the transitional authorities to handle exclusion from political processes, rising gender-based violence, and obstacles to full participation in upcoming elections.
Editor’s notice:
The next is an open letter, despatched on Aug. 7, 2025, to Laurent Saint-Cyr as he assumed the presidency of Haiti’s Presidential Transitional Council (CPT). Coordinated by the Institute for Justice & Democracy in Haiti (IJDH) and signed by greater than 30 Haitian and worldwide organizations, the letter requires pressing measures to guard the rights of girls and women and to make sure their full participation in political life, together with the elections scheduled earlier than the CPT’s mandate ends in February 2026.
Mr. Saint-Cyr’s presidency is the ultimate such time period earlier than the tip of the TPC mandate in February. He thus holds the final alternative to right the transitional authorities’s clear violations of the rights of Haitian girls and women underneath Haitian and worldwide legislation, at the same time as we observe no significant steps in the direction of guaranteeing that girls will be capable to form and take part within the elections Mr. Saint-Cyr is obligated to arrange throughout his time period.
The dearth of satisfactory consideration to girls’s security and inclusion – together with guaranteeing their potential to totally take part as organizers, candidates, and voters in any elections – each blatantly violates girls’s rights and dangers exacerbating and entrenching gendered harms into Haiti’s future.
The failure of the Haitian authorities – and of its worldwide companions – to respect the rights of Haiti’s girls and women on the whole is hanging. As documented in IJDH’s most up-to-date Human Rights Replace and set out within the letter, Haiti has a few of the most acute sexual violence and gendered privations on this planet. Ladies additionally stay marginalized in or outright excluded from decision-making and management – the dearth of a lady with a vote on the TPC is especially on the nostril.
Worldwide actors are sometimes not significantly better. It’s deeply disturbing, for instance, that within the lately introduced U.S. “bipartisan laws which requires the State Division to develop and implement a complete technique to confront the deepening disaster in Haiti and assist a Haitian-led path to stability” there’s zero point out of girls and women and their wants.
That is opposite to the U.S. authorities’s personal formal recognition of the worldwide Ladies, Peace, and Safety Agenda as each law and policy (notably each enacted underneath the earlier Trump administration) – based mostly on the insights that peace, democracy, and financial prosperity can solely be achieved and sustained when girls’s wants and management are centered.