Up to 3 million people risk starvation in Haiti following back-to-back storms that have wiped out large swathes of agriculture, an aid agency has warned.
Aid workers fear the devastation could also spark more unrest in Haiti where violent protests over spiralling food prices rocked the country earlier this year and triggered the government's fall in April.
On May 6, 2008, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR) ruled that the de facto government of Prime Minister G?rard Latortue and President Boniface Alexandre as well as the current administration of President Ren? Preval together have violated 11 provisions of the American Convention on Human Rights over the last four years in their treatment of former Haitian Prime Minister Yvon Neptune.
In its first-ever ruling involving Haiti, the court ordered the Haitian government to pay Neptune $95,000 in damages and costs. It also gave the Haitian government two years to bring conditions in its terrible prisons in line with minimum international standards.
SOPUDEP is a private non-profit school in Haiti that has served the poorest and most vulnerable children of the community of Petion-Ville since 2001. The children who attend SOPUDEP school would never have a chance at an education save for this wonderful project. Most of them also receive their only hot meal every school day through the school's Hot Lunch Program. Given the latest rise in food prices and the hardship this has caused Haitian families, the Hot Lunch Program is an indispensable component SOPUDEP's work in the community.
On July 29, approximately 200 former members of the Haitian armed forces took over several old military buildings in Haiti. The ex-soldiers were protesting the disbandment of the Haitian Army and the fourteen years of back pay they allege the government still owes them. The army was disbanded in 1995 by then-President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who was overthrown in 2004 by a coup organized in part by former military members. The pay the soldiers demand covers the time after the 1995 disbandment to today. The soldiers claim that since the president's actions were illegal, they still were technically employed by the government.
August 12, 2008 marks the first anniversary of the kidnapping of Lovinsky Pierre-Antoine, 53, a tireless human rights and anti-imperialist activist who was the national coordinator of the September 30th Foundation.
Lovinsky was kidnapped around 10 p.m. after dropping off a human rights delegation that he had been chaperoning around Haiti (see Haiti Libert?, Vol. 1, No. 4, Aug. 15, 2007).
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