From the Konbit (Working Group) Editors

We are pleased to post excerpts from this report to our working-group blog. Global Justice Clinic at NYU School of Law and The Promise Institute for Human Rights at UCLA School of Law have succeeded in exposing the connections among racism, colonialism, extraction, in/justice, and the state of Haiti’s ecosystems. Among other achievements, the report draws from the lived experience of Haitians on the ground in Haiti, and it lists nineteen organizations with which the authors collaborated, all of them developing strategies for adaptation and survival. The authors likewise relied on the work of thinkers outside of Haiti, notably the philosopher Olúfémi O. Táíwò, a leading voice on reparative justice. We cannot separate ecology from reparative justice, and we believe that this report makes a powerful call for reparations to Haiti.

Thank you to principal authors Ellie Happel, Sienna Merope-Synge, and S. Priya Morley for agreeing to share these excerpts and to Laura Wagner for help with Kreyòl translation. Photos taken by Ellie Happel and Sasha Kramer, as indicated in captions, used by permission.

Note: The title, a Haitian proverb, translates into English as “They who strike the blow forget, they who bear the scar remember.”

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Excerpts from Bay Kou Bliye, Pote Mak Sonje:

Climate Injustice in Haiti and the Case for Reparations

“Many of the countries who are responsible for the global climate crisis have a colonizing past. And the countries who are suffering the most are the former colonies….It’s a form of colonization that is continuing from a climate perspective—a climate colonization.”

Kettly Alexandre, Mouvman Peyizan Papay

“We are living in a world that is all about exploitation of resources, land, people—can we not imagine another world? Can we imagine a world where people live in harmony and have good relationships with their neighbors, where we offer solidarity with one another, where we place care at the center of our relationships with one another and with the land?”

Sabine Lamour, sociologist and former coordinator of feminist organization Solidarite Fanm Ayisyen

Context

Haiti is one of the countries most harmed by climate disorder (United Nations Population Fund 2023). Despite having only marginally contributed to, and economically benefited from, the activities that created climate disorder. The country’s vulnerability to heavy rains, drought, hurricanes, and other climate impacts is due not only to its location in the Caribbean but also, as this report shows, to its history of exploitation, originating in colonialism and slavery, and ongoing racist exploitation. Haiti illustrates how the climate crisis is a racial injustice crisis. Addressing these interlinked crises is urgent.

There is little available research presenting and analyzing the current and projected impacts of climate disorder on the human rights of Haitian people. There is a similar lack of literature showing how Haitian people–who are forced to adjust in the context of increasing climate disorder today–adapt and survive. This report aims to fill the gaps and to link Haiti’s experience of severe climate harms today with its history of Global North plunder, exclusion, intervention, and racist exploitation. Climate disorder and climate injustice are, at least in part, present-day symptoms of historic wrongs. This report advances the case for reparations to Haiti and argues that reparations are essential to addressing climate injustice.

Report Objectives and Approach

A key goal of this report is to provide facts and analyses about Haitians’ experience of climate disorder and its root causes, including its harms to Haitians’ human rights and its disparate impacts on peyizan and urban poor communities. (See note on the term peyizan below.) The purpose, too, is to inform and bolster arguments for reparations for Haiti–and, in turn, for other formerly colonized, Small Island Developing States (United Nations Office of the High Representative for the Least Developed Countries, Landlocked Developing Countries and Small Island Developing States). In addition, this report highlights the work of Haitian activists creating alternative livelihoods and organizing for climate justice in the context of climate disorder. This report also informs and engages those who seek to act in solidarity with Haitian people–particularly peyizan–and hopes to catalyze further discussion, research, and action for climate justice. The size of the problem requires collaboration across borders, disciplines, identities, and political viewpoints; this report thus seeks to reach a broad audience.

This report is the fruit of collaboration between human rights lawyers and Haitian activists and organizations. The Global Justice Clinic (GJC) has worked in solidarity with Haitian social movement actors for more than ten years; it is this history of collaboration that led the GJC and the Promise Institute for Human Rights at UCLA School of Law (the Promise Institute) to conduct the desk research and analysis that inform this report. GJC and the Promise Institute conducted dozens of interviews and small group discussions with contributing Haitian organizations. This report consolidates available information from a variety of sources relevant to climate disorder: legal, policy, scientific, historical, and economic. GJC and the Promise Institute also drew on the lens that Third World Approaches to International Law and Critical Race Theory scholarship offer to uncover the ways in which race and empire are central to, and perpetuated by, existing legal frameworks.

Chapter-by-Chapter Overview – Summarized by Haitian Studies Association Working Group on the Environment

Chapter I

• Drawing on secondary sources and conversations with activists and organizations, introduction to the gravity of Haitian peoples’ experience of climate disorder
• Identification of human rights violations, underlying inequality that exacerbates experience, and the responsibility of foreign actors

Chapter II

• Historical summary of Haiti’s impoverishment by foreign exploitation, the racism used as rationale, and the links among racism, exploitation, and climate vulnerability
• The story of the ransom France extorted from Haiti beginning in the nineteenth-century and the institution of an oppressive Rural Code that created today’s peyizan class
• Continued impoverishment in the twentieth-century: U.S. occupation, support for dictatorships, neocolonial economics such as structural adjustment

Chapter III

• Overview of the Haitian state’s (in)action
• Local communities’ strategies for adaptation and resilience, including but not limited to agroecology, solidarity economy, ecosystem protection
• Economic and political demands, like land rights, rural livelihoods, and an end to gold mining
• The urgent need for popular education
• Transformative international action

Chapter IV

• Reparations defined
• What reparative justice might entail and legal rationales for reparations in Haiti as embodied in international law, for example, the Global North’s excess emissions in violation of the “no harm” rule
• Necessity of building a reparations agenda led by the people of Haiti and including both compensation and transformative economic and political change

Full references here (page 15)

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