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Haitians Hope for Humanitarian Parole
New America Media—May 02, 2010
PORT AU PRINCE, Haiti –– It's 7 a.m. and the courtyard of the Bureau des Avocats Internationaux (BAI) is a beehive of activity. I awoke to about a dozen people sitting in folding chairs. The tent I've just slept in shares a blue tarp-roof with the makeshift “waiting room” just outside the offices of the human rights offices-turned-community center.
BAI is supported by the Institute for Justice and Democracy and has been working for justice in Haiti for over 15 years, pioneering movements to prosecute perpetrators of human rights violations in past political upheavals. Mario Joseph, its director, has spearheaded the prosecution of perpetrators of massacres and political human rights violations. BAI is synonymous with community justice, what has been coined a "victim centered" approach. The New York Times called Joseph "Haiti's most important human rights lawyer." He's also well connected to Haiti's grassroots organizing community.
BAI, which hosted a delegation of lawyers and doctors from the Bay Area, which I joined, was there to assess possible candidates for so-called humanitarian parole. These are people whose conditions are so unbearable that they need to leave Haiti in order to survive. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security enacted the program following the Haiti earthquake to allow individuals with urgent humanitarian needs to come to the United States for a temporary stay.
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"We did see patterns in the cases. In terms of just the gravest needs," Fleming said. She has identified five categories of need. "Women who have suffered gender-based violence; orphans and vulnerable children; elders––I call them elder-orphans-- who don't have families who can take care of them; people with very severe medical needs that can't be treated in Haiti; and then, I would say, people who were disabled before the earthquake and have a severe disability and simply can't subsist and survive because the ordinary social structures and support systems are non-existent." |
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