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by Kim Ives
Brian Concannon is a founder and
director of the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti (IJDH).
He has had a ring-side seat to legal affairs in Haiti for almost
two decades, acting as a UN Human Rights Officer, helping to
prosecute human rights crimes in Haiti following the 1991-1994
coup d’état, representing former Prime Minister Yvon Neptune
before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, and presently
acting as a lead lawyer in the suit of 5,000 Haitian cholera
victims against the United Nations.
In an interview with Haïti
Liberté, Concannon said that he views Port-au-Prince
District Attorney Lucmane Délille’s recent opening of an
investigation of former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide “in the
context of a long history of baseless complaints against
Aristide.”
One of the first of these legal
offensives was a civil complaint for financial malfeasance filed
in a U.S. Court in Miami in November 2005 by the de facto regime
of Prime Minister Gérard Latortue. “That complaint was filed
with great fanfare, and was widely reported,” Concannon said.
“The Interim Government of Haiti (IGH) and its U.S. supporters
went on tour, to Washington, New York, and other places, with
speaking engagements to discuss the complaint, which generated
lots of press coverage.”
“When you sue someone in the
US, the first thing you do is file the complaint with the
courthouse,” Concannon explained. “The second thing you do,
typically immediately, is to engage a process server to serve the complaint on the defendants. The service is what
actually starts the case going, requiring the defendants to
respond, activating the case scheduling deadlines and so forth.
It also gives the defendant the opportunity to do ‘discovery,’
to force the plaintiff to present its case. Although the Haitian
government spent a lot a lot of money to hire a large Chicago
firm to prepare and publicize the complaint, it never actually
served the complaint on anyone. Aristide was in South Africa,
which might have caused some obstacles, but many of the
co-defendants were living openly in South Florida. Courts always
have a deadline for serving the complaint after filing. The law
firm obtained one extension to file, but again never served
anything. Right before that extension expired in July 2006, the
law firm asked the judge to voluntarily dismiss the case,
‘without prejudice’ – meaning they could refile... But the claim
has never been refiled. The complaint did force several of the
defendants to engage lawyers to prepare their defense, and to
suffer significant anxiety about being dragged into an
expensive, if baseless, suit. I have never seen a plaintiff fail
to serve a defendant, other than that one case. I cannot see any
explanation other than that the whole case was a cynical public
relations strategy, and a way for the IGH to apply pressure on
and discredit Aristide.”
In February 2012, there was
another complaint prepared against Aristide in the Haitian
justice system (see “The Curious Case of the ‘Warrants’ against
Aristide,” Haïti Liberté, Vol. 5, No. 33, Feb. 29, 2012).
The complaint was based on a report drawn up by the Central Unit
for Financial Inquiry and Research (UCREF), which was the same
document that formed the basis of the unserved U.S. complaint.
The prosecutor drew up papers, but apparently never filed formal
charges.
Concannon feels that the filing
of specious claims against Aristide is a tactic used by his
political opponents and that the current probe may be part of
this strategy.
“It is important for citizens to be able to use the
justice system to force current and former government officials
to respect the law,” Concannon said. “But these cases are simply
not serious. I have not seen the complaints, so cannot know for
sure, but it appears that they are both factually and legally
deficient on their face, and that the prosecutor should not have
pursued them. The prosecutor’s refusal to produce the complaints
leads me to believe that he knows they are deficient. It is now
easy enough for him to pass the file on to the ‘juge
d’instruction’ (investigating judge) and wash his hands, saying
‘justice is taking its course.’ That will allow Aristide’s
opponents many months of saying he was charged with stealing
money and abusing boys. The investigating process is secret, so
there will be no way for Aristide’s lawyers to cross examine the
witnesses against him, or otherwise disprove the case. He will
spend many months fighting charges that are, apparently,
completely baseless, and the investigating judge will invest
scarce public resources investigating obviously empty charges.
That is not justice. Justice is a prosecutor doing his job by
declining to pursue a complaint that has no basis.”
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