Republic of Haiti Submission to the United Nations - Universal Periodic review (UPR)

The housing crisis in Haiti constitutes a grave violation of human rights. A majority of Haitians live in overpopulated urban centers, shanty towns or under-developed villages that fail to meet minimum standards of habitability. These settlements lack access to basic necessities such as clean water, sanitation, and electricity, and are plagued by high rates of violence, particularly sexual violence against women and girls. Moreover, there is virtually no security of tenure in Haiti, which leaves a majority of people, especially the urban poor, facing a constant threat of forced eviction and related human rights violations.

These conditions pre-date the earthquake that hit Haiti in January 2010, and according to the Government’s own assessment, exacerbated its effects. When the Government announced a reconstruction plan in March 2010, it noted that the toll of the earthquake – 250,000 people killed, and another 2 million left homeless – did not result from the tremor alone, but from “an excessively dense population, a lack of adequate building standards, the disastrous state of the environment, disorganized land use, and an unbalanced division of economic activity.”

At the time of this submission, fourteen months were passed since the earthquake, and the Government of Haiti had yet to adopt a plan that will adequately achieve durable solutions to displacement, poverty or homelessness. This 13 pages Universal Periodic Review was submitted by the Haitian Government to the United Nations at the 12th Session of the Working Group of the Human Rights Council, held on October 3 - 14 of 2011.