ARTICLE - RESTORATION OF JUSTICE ARCHIVES

THE ARCHIVES OF THE PALACE OF JUSTICE UNDER RESTORATION
(Haiti Libre) -

Gathered in bulk, legal files and records of the civil-state of the West Department were taken from the ruins of the Palace of Justice of Port-au-Prince, after the earthquake of January 2010, and were then transported to a wet room, where they were stored on wooden shelves and chewed by termites...

Given the importance of these documents, the Section of Human Rights (SDH) of the Minustah, and the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), launched the project "Reconstruction of the Archives of the Palace of Justice" for an initial period of 3 months.

The recruitment of an expert in records management, namely the archivist Carline Lanoue and six employees, allowed the project to begin which consists of "Strengthening the criminal justice system by improving access to records, ... more particularly records management." This involves the classification of records (decisions of criminal and correctional courts), orders of magistrates, acts of civil status, divorces and adoptions, etc...) for the Registry of the Palace of Justice and their inventory.

First observation of the archivist, .... "When I arrived at the Palace of Justice we found all these documents and records all jumbled. The files were damaged and all piled into a room that did not meet the standards of an archival repository." Conservators are responsible for repairing and changing the covers of books, to make them identifiable by the colors assigned to the different sections of the civil-state section.

Work is progressing and in the archive room, many documents have already been sorted and classified either in boxes or in drawers. This is a provisional classification where each box is codified. It bears in this way the code of the court and the judge. A color is assigned to each judge who also has his drawer on which he can find his color and code.

In drawers, files are classified according to the particular offense or the court. About the courts (civil, commercial, correctional, criminal, and juvenile), each also has a color and labels. The documents are classified by year, judge and offense. The colors are used to identify them more quickly and for that, a summary database was created.

The reconstruction of the archives of the Palace of Justice allowed the recovery of criminal files lost among the records of civil status, ... which will lead to the recovery of files for many detainees and will revive the judicial process. When the archiving is complete, Carline Lanoue, would like to digitize the documents, to leave the Palace of Justice with a "working tool that is easy to consult."