A Boston judge ordered a former mayor of a western Haiti town to pay $15.5 million in damages following a guilty verdict in a civil case alleging torture, extrajudicial killings, attempted murder and arson.
Despite a murder charge in the Haitian courts, Jean Morose Viliena, a resident of Malden, Massachusetts, became mayor of Les Irois in Haiti’s Grand’Anse region in 2012, according to the Miami Herald.
Five years later, the San Francisco-based Center for Justice & Accountability, Morrison & Foerster and the international law firm, Dentons, filed a lawsuit against Viliena, now an Uber and school transportation driver in the Boston area.
The entities sued on behalf of three Haitian men — David Boniface, Juders Ysemé and Nissage Martyr — who claimed Viliena and his allies subjected them to political persecution, including human rights violations.
Ysemé said he was at a Les Irois radio station Viliena announced he would attack. He claimed that Viliena and his group entered “with guns and machetes,” beat him, and “issued orders to shoot me,” adding that he lost his right eye.
“For 15 years, we’ve been fighting in Haiti to find justice and could never find it,” Ysemé told the Herald of the verdict, claiming that Viliena used his power to obstruct justice each time they believed they had a court appearance in Haiti.
The Torture Victim Protection Act of 1991 was the legal basis for the case. If victims cannot obtain justice in their home countries, the law permits civil lawsuits in the U.S. against foreign authorities who violate international law.
Following a five-day trial that included expert witnesses — like retired professor Robert Maguire, a long-time expert on Haiti, and Brian Concannon of the Institute for Justice & Democracy in Boston — jurors ruled in favor of the plaintiffs.
Attorney Daniel McLaughlin of the Center for Justice & Accountability said the decision has left them all overjoyed. He noted that the judge admitted the plaintiffs’ attempts to seek justice in Haiti were pointless due to corruption, a broken judicial system, and threats of retaliation against those who dared to take on powerful politicians. “It’s an acknowledgment of the harms that they suffered, the killings, the torture, the attempted extrajudicial killings.”
McLaughlin said it is unclear how much of the debt Viliena can pay as he did not present much proof of his financial resources, but the case was more about money than accountability.
Maguire believes the jurors’ decision should convey to Haitian society that those who violate human rights are not immune from punishment indefinitely, adding that it should give courage to the abused.
“The verdict sends a strong message to those in Haiti who abuse their power and the human rights of others,” he said, the Herald reported, “that their impunity resulting from Haiti’s weak and dysfunctional rule of law does not follow them to the United States.”
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