Chelsea Clinton, Donna Shalala to visit Clinton Foundation projects in Haiti July 28-29
Trip will highlight Clinton Foundation partnerships and programs working in Haiti to encourage economic growth and development, empower girls and women, and support small businesses
On Tuesday, July 28, and Wednesday, July 29, Clinton Foundation Vice Chair Chelsea Clinton and Clinton Foundation President Donna Shalala will lead a group of philanthropists, business leaders, and Clinton Foundation supporters to visit Foundation efforts that are supporting the development and growth of the Haitian agriculture, health, entrepreneurship, and business sectors. Chelsea Clinton will also host a No Ceilings Conversation on empowering Haitian girls and women as entrepreneurs.
Illustrating the Clinton Foundation’s innovative philanthropic model, efforts in Haiti take a multi-faceted approach in fostering sustainable economic development with a shared goal of increasing opportunities for girls and women. This includes helping to raise emergency relief funds; providing grants to local organizations; and creating partnerships between public, private, and nonprofit organizations.
Since 2010, the Clinton Foundation has helped raise more than $36 million for Haiti, including relief funds and projects that are focused on supporting Haiti’s small and medium businesses; improving livelihoods; enhancing education; and exploring the nexus of agriculture, energy, and the environment. Today, the Clinton Foundation focuses on creating sustainable economic growth in priority sectors of energy, tourism, agriculture, and artisans/manufacturing. The Clinton Giustra Enterprise Partnership (CGEP), an initiative of the Clinton Foundation, has also created a social enterprise in Haiti that works to address market opportunities in local supply and distribution chains.
Additionally, through the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI), an initiative of the Clinton Foundation, CGI members have made more than 100 Commitments to Action focused on Haiti, which will be valued over $500 million when fully funded and implemented. Now in its seventh year, CGI’s Haiti Action Network has a significant focus on creating sustainable jobs and encouraging investment in the country.
RSVP AND TRANSPORTATION NOTE: The Clinton Foundation will provide transportation to reporters in Haiti for these site visits. If you have an interest in covering the events and taking our transportation between sites, please reply to
25 Boat people Haitian discovered to Boyton Beach
Last Saturday morning a boat transporting illegal migrants reached the North entrance of Boynton Beach, near the Boynton Inlet, in Palm Beach County Florida.
After a fisherman alerted authorities via radio, at about 10:30 am, that a boat had docked and that numerous people aboard had then fled, Officer Darin Hederian went on site and found the boat empty of its passengers and alerted Boynton Beach Police “Dispatch.”
The Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office, the Coast Guard, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, and the Manalapan Police assisted the Boynton Beach Police in the search operations, which resulted in finding 27 migrants hidden in bushes along State Road A1A, among whom 25 were of Haitian origin.
According to initial information the migrants left the Bahamas and none needed medical care when they arrived on the beach. They were turned in to the "US BORDER PATROL" for questioning. The agency will later decide if they will be returned to their country.
Obama silent on stateless Haitians
Politicians, activists want President to stop Dominican Republic’s anti-immigrant policy
Carolyn Guniss | 7/15/2015
The silence from Congress, the U.S. State Department and President Barack Obama is troubling on civic and human rights violation by the Dominican Republic against Haitian-descendents living in Dominican Republic, said politicians, human rights activists and lawyers.
On a conference call Thursday, Congresswoman Frederica Wilson and human rights activists told representatives from the state department that stripping aways citizenship from Haitians by the Dominican Republic is not an immigration issue as it is presented but a human rights violation and they wanted to know why Secretary of State John Kerry and President Obama himself have not condemned the action.
“FIU Professor Ediberto Roman correctly says its as if the U.S. government suddenly had issued a ruling stripping all Black Americans or all Armenian-Americans, Italian-Americans, or any minority that had been living in the US for generations of citizenship. And then created a flawed and arbitrary registration process and tried to hide behind the rubric of immigration when what they really had done was a massive human rights violations of rendering a whole class of its citizens stateless because you don’t like their color or ethnicity, even though they’ve been present in the country for generations and born there,” said Steve Forester, Immigration Policy Coordinator, with the Institute for Justice & Democracy in Haiti.
Haiti and the Dominican Republic share the island of Hispaniola. For generations Haitians, have migrated to the Dominican Republic to work in agriculture, construction and service industries. But in 2010 -- the same year as the massive earthquake that devastated Haiti destabilizing even further the poorest nation in the western hemisphere -- the Dominican Republic high court passed a constitutional amendment that limits citizenship to children of legal immigrants, or those with one Dominican parent. A 2013 court ruling made the law retroactive to 1929. In 2014, the Dominican Republic passed another law, saying it was creating a pathway to citizenship. It would allow those in the Dominican Republic registry to have their citizenship restored and others could get naturalized if they could produce required documentation by June 17. The cost of not meeting the deadline was deportation, some to a country they had never visited. Haitian descendants living in the Dominican Republic may or may not speak French or Creole, since Spanish is the language spoken in Dominican Republic. That deadline has passed and thousands of Haitian descendants did not have the documents, and may be forced to leave.
People on the call asked for “a more a high-level focus” and questioned the silence from the House Committee on Foreign Affairs. Some on the call asked for economic sanctions through a presidential executive order.
Representatives from the state department said Kerry had spoken privately to Danilo Medina,president of Dominican Republic, in hopes to find a diplomatic solution to the island’s anti-immigration policy.
“This call has been very helpful to the U.S. so we can understand public opinion on this. At the same time the Department of State has to make clear that the Dominican Republic is an independent, sovereign nation,” said Kent Brokenshire, deputy coordinator at the State Department. He points out that the policy came from the island’s highest court.
‘Dominican sovereignty not negotiable’
Santo Domingo.-Dominican Republic last Wednesday rejected any attempt to obstruct its sovereignty and self-determination, in response to the Haitian Government’s reiterated request for a protocol to negotiate the deportation their undocumented nationals.
In response to the statements by Haiti Foreign minister Lener Renauld at a meeting of the Organization of American States (OAS) in Washington, his Dominican counterpart Pedro Verges said Santo Domingo measures the situation in Haiti 'with the same yardstick " it measure its relations with other states.
"No other member of the inter-American community or any part of the world negotiates the terms of its immigration laws with another nation simply because it’s a sovereign right of States," Verges said.
Haiti still needs more than $30 million for elections
A top U.S. official stunned some Washington lawmakers Wednesday with testimony that Haiti needs as much as $50 million to carry out successful elections this year.
The declaration during a Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee on Western Hemisphere hearing comes just three weeks before Haiti is scheduled to hold the first of three critical elections.
“There is a fairly good chance (the election) will happen,” Thomas Adams, the State Department’s special coordinator for Haiti, said about the scheduled Aug. 9 elections to restore Haiti’s parliament. “But there are still a few issues left. One is a lack of funding.”
Adam’s whopping $50 million figure during his testimony caused Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., to ask, “How many people live in Haiti?”
“Eleven million,” Adams said.
“And you need $50 million to pull off an election?” Boxer said.
Adams revelation during the hearing, chaired by Florida Republican and U.S. presidential candidate Marco Rubio, came a day before a United Nations’ donor conference in New York to help fill Haiti’s funding gap. U.N. officials and Haitian Prime Minister Evans Paul, who will be attending, hope to raise $31 million to cover the second and possibly third rounds of voting.
Adams said his higher figure includes other costs, such as electoral observation and support for the Haitian National Police, which will have to shoulder most of the responsibility for security.
“It is a complex electoral process,” a high-ranking U.N. official said during a briefing about Thursday’s conference, describing Haiti’s election timetable as “a major undertaking.”
With almost every elected office up for grabs, about 40,000 candidates have registered for 6,102 posts, including president. Runoffs for the legislative races are scheduled for Oct. 25, which is also the first round of presidential elections. Voting for local elections, which should have been held in 2011, also will be held that day.
Should no one win the presidential race outright, runoffs are scheduled for Dec. 27.
U.N. officials acknowledge that some challenges remain including excluded candidates insisting on their reinstatement by the Provisional Electoral Council, but say Haiti is on track.
“All things considered, this council for the first time, has been a council that has managed to build up a certain degree of credibility with the actors in the process where at the middle of 2014, for instance, there were many political parties who indicated that they would not go to elections under this administration,” the U.N. official said. “Across the board, political parties have signed up to participate, the candidates have signed up to participate.”
At the hearing, Rubio, who also noted concerns about Haiti’s ongoing border dispute with the Dominican Republic and U.S. spending in Haiti, said he is now “cautiously optimistic that a new democratically elected government will be inaugurated.”
“When Haiti is stable and prosperous, America benefits,” he said. “When Haiti is unstable, unsecure and lacking in opportunity for its people, it creates vacuums where criminal gangs — or worse — can operate. And it can lead to migratory pressures in the U.S. — or disastrous and deadly tragedies on the high seas.”
Elections sign of a vibrant democracy
BY HERVÉ LADSOUS AND JESSICA FAIETA
Haiti will reach a major historic milestone this summer. Starting Aug. 9, some 6 million Haitians will choose 1,280 representatives for local administrations, 140 mayors, 139 Parliamentarians and, finally, their president. The several rounds of electoral processes could last until the end of the year.
It has not been easy to arrive at this moment. The Haitian people have been waiting three years for these elections. Parliament has been absent since January. Haiti has made significant strides to restore confidence in the political process and to hold elections on time. The electoral council, appointed in January, has been impressive in taking on several challenging technical, logistical and financial tasks aiming to ensure a credible, inclusive and transparent process. The electoral law and calendar were promulgated in March, the majority of political parties have fielded candidates and the national police have been working to ensure a secure environment for the elections.
The United Nations peacekeeping mission in Haiti, MINUSTAH, the United Nations Development Program and other U.N. partners have invested significant effort over recent years to strengthen national electoral capabilities.
Much work has already been accomplished, but much more needs to be done to complete elections of such scale and complexity. Thus far, the joint effort by the national authorities and international donors has generated enough resources to finance only the first round of polls on Aug. 9.
We cannot stop here. We appeal to all of Haiti’s international partners to step up their efforts and support Haiti in crossing the finish line of this march toward peace and stability. While important contributions have been received from Haiti’s partners, there is a crucial gap that needs to be filled. Without this support, the completion of the electoral cycle risks being jeopardized, as does Haiti’s hard-won progress.
These elections will mark the longest period of institutional stability that the country has enjoyed in its recent history. It will be the second time since 2006 that a democratically elected president will hand over power to his successor. The process will have a positive effect on the sub-region, promoting socioeconomic development and regional stability.
While it is important for Haiti’s international partners to continue to lend their generous support to the country’s democratic process, it is equally crucial for Haiti’s government to manage this properly and ensure its institutions have all that is required to fully take charge of the elections.
On July 16, the United Nations, the prime minister of Haiti, government officials and international partners are to meet in New York, a major opportunity to reaffirm our common commitment to the democratic consolidation of the country and our solidarity with its people’s aspirations and hopes for progress.
The people of Haiti have struggled for decades to consolidate democracy in the country. In 1986, a popular uprising removed the Duvalier regime. Today, in 2015, there are over 38,000 candidates for the local elections alone. A vibrant democracy is alive and well in Haiti, and the Haitian people recognize that governance is everyone’s responsibility.
Across the globe in countries where democracy, good governance and respect for the rule of law is the norm, political power is contested through peaceful and democratic means. Citizens adopt peaceful and democratic methods to solve the problems they face. Dialogue and tolerance become the order of the day. Haiti, one of the world’s oldest democracies, is ready for this transition and deserves our full support.
HERVÉ LADSOUS IS THE UNDER-SECRETARY-GENERAL FOR THE UNITED NATIONS DEPARTMENT OF PEACEKEEPING OPERATIONS. JESSICA FAIETA IS U.N. ASSISTANT SECRETARY-GENERAL AND U.N. DEVELOPMENT PROGRAMME (UNDP) DIRECTOR FOR LATIN AMERICA AND THE CARIBBEAN.
U.S. official hopeful that cash-strapped Haiti can hold elections
WASHINGTON
There is a "fairly good chance" legislative elections in Haiti will happen as scheduled in August, a U.S. State Department official said on Wednesday, adding that the United States will provide more funds to assure polling goes smoothly.
The United States will also ask other countries at the United Nations in New York for pledges of money on Thursday to pay for the elections in the impoverished nation, Tom Adams, State Department Special Coordinator for Haiti told the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Western Hemisphere Subcommittee.
Haiti needs another $50 million for three upcoming elections this year. The first, scheduled Aug. 9 is for every seat in the Chamber of Deputies and 20 of 30 Senate seats. Parliament dissolved Jan. 12 after President Michel Martelly's government failed to organize elections and the terms ran out for most sitting members.
Senator Marco Rubio, the chairman of the subcommittee, asked Adams if he believes Martelly will cede power after the October presidential election and a possible December runoff.
Adams replied; "He wants to have them, and he wants to leave (office) in February."
Many fear political violence and do not trust elections officials to handle possible disruptions. Some well-known candidates, such as former Prime Minister Laurent Lamothe and university rector Jacky Lumarque, were deemed ineligible.
The provisional electoral council, which ultimately decides who appears on the ballot, determined neither of the two had passed the required investigations into their use of government finances. Both Lamothe and Lumarque have publicly contested their removals.
Concerns over electoral violence have heightened after the July 1 drawdown of United Nations peacekeepers, with the troop force now cut to 2,370 soldiers and 2,600 police, from a peak of more than 13,300 uniformed officers.
Adams told the subcommittee the Haitian National Police does not have enough officers to control the entire country. He said Haiti needs 30,000 local police but only has 12,000.
Adams said elections were still feasible, and were badly needed to accelerate reforms to open the country up to more foreign investment.
(Reporting by Peter Granitz in Port-au-Prince and Patricia Zengerle in Washington; Editing by David Adams and Andrew Hay)
VOLUNTARY RETURNS OF THE DOMINICAN REPUBLIC TOWARDS HAITI?
Haiti / Dominican Republic figures communicated by the DPC
According to the last report of the Management of the Disaster and Emergency Services of Haiti, from June 21st till July 9th, 2015, 19,138 people from the Dominican Republic arrived in Haiti, both by official means and by non-official means, from the Haitian-Dominican border.
Of these 19,138 people, 6,116 entered through official entry points, and 13,022 by non-official entry points.
8,480 entered by Ouanaminthe, 2,829 by Belladère, 1,725 by Lascahobas, 1,609 by Cornillon, 1,509 by Ganthie, 1,306 by Anse-à-Pitre, 848 by Savanette, 275 by Thomassique, 142 by Capotille, 114 by Cerca-La-Source, 113 by Fond-verrettes, 87 by Thomonde, 65 by Mont-Organize, 22 by Carice, 8 by Ferrier and 6 by Thomazeau.
Sources used at the official posts are: the Management of the Immigration and the Emigration of the Ministry of the Interior and Regions; and for the non-official Points the National Office of the Migration, city halls and the Coordinators of CASEC and Structures of the Disaster and Emergency Services of 4 border departments.
In terms of needs, the DPC underlines in its report the necessity: to strengthen the mechanisms to monitor on the border the people arriving from the Dominican Republic; the strengthening of the structures to document and welcome those arriving; the strengthening of structures specialized in the reception of the vulnerable groups; and the identification of the specific cases of protection for people at risk of being stateless.