Civil society organizations and human rights groups accused the Henry government in 2023 of shielding politicians with documented connections to gang networks from accountability, arguing that the government’s failure to act on evidence of political-criminal collusion was itself a form of complicity in the violence that was destroying Haitian communities. The accusations were specific, naming individuals whose relationships with gang leaders had been documented by UN monitors, Canadian sanctions proceedings, and journalistic investigations.
The pattern of inaction was not new — successive Haitian governments had failed to hold accountable the politicians and business figures whose support enabled gang governance. But the Henry government’s failure was particularly stark given the scale of the violence occurring under its watch and the availability of international documentation identifying specific individuals who warranted investigation.
International sanctions had been imposed on some of these figures by the United States and Canada, but the Haitian government had taken no corresponding domestic legal action. Prosecutors who might have opened investigations faced security threats and institutional pressure. The judicial system that was barely functioning for ordinary criminal cases was entirely incapable of taking on politically sensitive prosecutions of powerful individuals with gang connections.
Haitian civil society organizations argued that without accountability for those who had created and maintained Haiti’s criminal governance system, security missions and political agreements would be addressing symptoms while leaving the underlying disease untouched. They called for conditionality on international support that required specific accountability actions as a precondition for continued engagement with the Henry government.