Where are the women?

By Pascale Solages and Sasha Filippova

Haitian feminist and human rights leaders are calling out Haiti’s transitional government for excluding women and their priorities, even as it purports to restore a rights-based democratic government. For example, Haiti’s nine-member Transitional Presidential Council (TPC) has only one woman, and she has no vote as one of the TPC’s two observers. No women were interviewed for the post of interim prime minister.  

The exclusion of women from decision-making in Haiti’s politics has become a pattern. This not only violates Haiti’s constitutional requirement for gender equality in the nation’s public affairs but also threatens the effectiveness of Haiti’s transition as a whole. Haiti’s international partners have remained shockingly silent.

Haitian advocates are fighting back with a Policy Framework for an Effective and Equitable Transition that has been endorsed by over 135 organizations from around the world. The Framework sets out the binding laws and best practices necessitating women’s inclusion in Haiti’s transition, emphasizing that to be meaningful, inclusion must be robust, resourced, and reflective of the priorities of Haiti’s women’s movement. It proposes recommendations that will serve as a foundation for advancing the rights of Haitian women and safeguarding Haiti’s transition. It must be urgently adopted if Haiti is to succeed in ending its crisis.

While imperfect, Haiti’s transitional government has the opportunity to rebuild the social compact and usher in democratic governance grounded in human rights by breaking with past harmful practices and leveraging the social disruption of Haiti’s crisis into structural transformations towards greater collective dignity and equity.

But, as reflected in the Framework, it cannot do so if it excludes Haiti’s women. So far, women have either been excluded entirely (as with the top decision-making positions of Prime Minister and on the TPC) or included in a manner divorced from advancing women’s rights or devoid of genuine authority and access. The inclusion of a woman with no vote on the TPC is just one reason to be concerned with tokenism. Others abound.     

Transitional ministerial appointments – made after a denunciation of this pattern by human rights groups – included women, but ones largely disconnected from Haiti’s women’s movement and its priorities. The result is a minister of the Ministry on the Status and Rights of Women in Haiti who proposes to remake her mandate into one focusing on families. This is a move that, at best, would dilute the ministry’s efforts to support the specific needs of women and girls against a background of deep gendered inequality and discrimination. At worst, it represents a regressive understanding of women’s role in society as connected solely to family. 

The recently appointed nine-member commission on criminal reform likewise fits into this harmful pattern. It has only one woman, and none of the appointees are known to have taken part in the long-standing fight to modernize Haiti’s laws with the needs of women and girls in mind. This means that the commission is likely to miss opportunities to improve Haiti’s outdated criminal justice system in a way that protects women’s rights and dignity, even though reforms are badly needed to create protections from sexual violence, harassment, and discrimination, and to decriminalize the fundamental right to abortion. 

Such gendered exclusions and failures to center the priorities of the women’s movement and issues that specifically affect women and girls violate explicit constitutional requirements for gender equality. In this, they betray the core principles meant to guide the transition and constitute a harm to Haiti’s women and girls under both national and international law. 

As a consequence, they threaten the success of Haiti’s transition back to democracy and the rule of law. This conclusion is separately supported by long-standing global principles like the United Nations’ Women, Peace, and Security Agenda, which codifies the recognition that including women and centering women-specific considerations is a best practice for conflict-affected transitions. Higher levels of gender equity strongly correlate with greater levels of democracy, social stability, and more robust economic development for all individuals. 

By persisting with this pattern, the transitional government and its international partners further waste the opportunity to confront historic inequalities and discrimination that have marginalized Haitian women in public, economic, and private life, exposed them to gender-based violence, and frequently denied them recourse. 

Corrective action is urgent. The transitional government is in the process of putting together the institutions that will shape Haiti’s future, including a provisional electoral council and a national security council. 

If the TPC does not reverse course and systematically integrate women and their concerns into the transition from now on, the history of excluding Haitian women will keep repeating itself, consequently undermining Haiti’s democratic and economic future.

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