An early defender of more humane treatment of the Taíno was the Spanish priest Bartolomé de Las Casas.
Slavery in Saint-Domingue, France's most lucrative colony, was known to be especially brutal, with a complete turnover of the slave population due to death every 20 years.
[3] According to the historian Laurent Dubois, between 5 and 10 percent of slaves died every year due to overwork and disease, a rate that outpaced births.
[6] The country's poverty made it vulnerable throughout its history to political instability and human rights abuses both by Haitian state officials and foreign interventions.
In 1915, following a coup that led to the mob killing of Haitian President Vibrun Guillaume Sam, United States sailors and marines landed in order to protect U.S. interests in the country.
For example, following a 1991 coup by the military that overthrew democratically elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the Haitian army was accused of killing an estimated 3,000 people in three years.
Survivors of the 2018 Lasalin massacre [9] allege that the PHTK, ruling political Party headed by Jovenel Moïse, were responsible for the orchestrated attack and mass murder of civilians.
[10] In 1957, François Duvalier, known as "Papa Doc", became president of Haiti, ushering in a period of human rights abuses.
In 1959, François Duvalier formed a paramilitary force[12] known as the Tonton Macoute, named after a mythic Haitian character who kidnapped misbehaving children, carried them off in a bag and ate them for breakfast.
[13] "The macoutes were Papa Doc's version of brownshirts and the Waffen SS, except that their usual uniform was blue jeans, T-shirts, sunglasses, and they carried clubs or pistols," wrote journalist and author Herbert Gold in Best Nightmare on Earth: A Life in Haiti.
"[14] The Tonton Macoute continued to openly terrorise the population until they were officially disbanded after Jean-Claude Duvalier was forced from the presidency and went into exile in 1986.
Courts of justice were in effect "run by the judges, appointed by the " 'President for Life' (the Duvaliers), who lacked the independence to make judgments about abuses against human rights.
[17] Although the Constitution mandates an independent judiciary and the right to a fair trial, prolonged pretrial detention remains a serious problem.
[1] Because the court system and its records are poorly organized, it is impossible to determine the exact percentage of prisoners being held without trial.
[22] The practice meets formal international definitions of modern day slavery and child trafficking, and is believed to affect an estimated 300,000 Haitian children.
[23] The number of CDW (Child Domestic Workers) in Haiti, defined as 1) living away from parents' home; 2) not following normal progression in education; and 3) working more than other children, is more than 400,000.
The UN called on authorities to address "impunity, corruption, structural inequality and adequate standard of living in order to restore public confidence and prevent future unrests.