28381: Sprague (News) Three political prisoners freed (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Sprague <jebsprague@mac.com>



Three political prisoners freed in Haiti

http://sfbayview.com/041906/prisonersfreed041906.shtml

by Lyn Duff



<PHOTO>

Children of political prisoners demonstrate in Port-au-Prince for
their parents to be released.



Human rights activists and Haiti?s pro-democracy populace are
cheering about the fact that three political prisoners have been
released in Port-au-Prince. On Easter weekend, Judge Mimose Janvier,
the investigating magistrate in the cases of Mario Exilhomme, Harold
Sévère and Anthony Nazaire, ordered the three to be freed, saying
that no evidence had been produced to indicate they committed a
crime. Exilhomme had been illegally imprisoned for 10 months while
Nazaire and Sévère had been held without charge since March 2004.

Exilhomme is a grassroots pro-democracy activist. At the request of
the Haitian Ministry of Justice, he was arrested in the Dominican
Republic, where he was staying legally, and extradited to Haiti on
July 22, 2005. He was never charged with a crime, and prosecutors
never produced any evidence of wrongdoing

Harold Sévère , the former mayor of Port-au-Prince, was one of those
freed. Sévère was arrested March 14, 2004, but was never charged with
a crime. Anthony Nazaire, a former officer in the National Palace
Security Unit, was arrested the same day.

On Dec. 23, 2004, a judge, recognizing that the government had
produced no evidence against them, ordered Harold Sévère and Anthony
Nazaire to be freed on their own recognizance. The prosecutor even
agreed to execute the order but was overridden by an illegal order
from the minister of justice, says attorney Mario Joseph of the human
rights organization Bureau des Avocats Internationaux in Port-au-Prince.


<photo>

Family members of political prisoners wait outside the National
Penitentiary in Port-au-Prince to see their loved ones.


On Dec. 30, 2004, former Justice Minister Bernard Gousse sent a
letter to the chief judge of the Port-au-Prince trial court, ordering
him to remove all the case files in the possession of Investigating
Magistrates Jean Sénat Fleury and Brédy Fabien. This came days after
Judge Fleury ordering the liberation of Fr. Gérard Jean-Juste, a pro-
democracy activist, and Judge Fabien ordered the provisional release
of Sévère and Nazaire, says Joseph.

No one knows how many political prisoners there are in Haiti, says
American attorney Brian Concannon of the Institute for Justice and
Democracy in Haiti. ?Prison authorities routinely limit human rights
groups? access to prison records. But we know that 90 percent of the
total prison population has not been convicted of a crime and that
some were engaged in political activity before their arrest.? More
than 2,000 people are currently imprisoned in Port-au-Prince.

As political prisoners languish in prisons and police stations across
Haiti, three police officers implicated in a bloody massacre at a
USAID-sponsored soccer tournament last August have been released from
prison. On April 17, by order of Judge Jean Péreste Paul, Inspector
Renan Etienne, who served as the director of the Central Police
Administration and reportedly had close ties to the rebels who staged
the 2004 coup, was released along with three other officers. Speaking
on Radio Caraïbes Monday afternoon, a spokesperson for released
police officers said that they did nothing wrong and expected to be
fully cleared of any criminal acts in the August 2005 incident.

Lyn Duff, LynDuff@aol.com, is a reporter currently based in Port-au-
Prince. She first traveled to Haiti in 1995 to help establish a
children?s radio station and has since covered Haiti extensively for
the Bay View, Pacifica Radio?s Flashpoints, heard on KPFA 94.1 FM
weekdays at 5 p.m., and other local and national media.
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