Call for Support for Haitian Father Jean-Juste

Here's an action you can take for Father Jean-Juste, prominent Haitian priest,
popular among the poor, and a possible presidential candidate that the interim
regime in Haiti is attempting to silence. See an excellent Village Voice
article below that describes his arrest, his ongoing detention, and the
possible reasons why the Haitian regime is doing this.48 Hour Call for Faxes for Release of Fr. Gerard Jean-Juste

Bill Quigley Going to Haiti Monday

Fax number 1-504-861-5440

Bill Quigley, one of the lawyers for Fr. Gerard
Jean-Juste, is going to Haiti on Monday August 15 to
deliver letters and faxes to the U.S. Embassy calling
for the release of Fr. Jean-Juste.

Thanks to you over 500 people have already sent
letters or faxes which Bill will deliver to the U.S.
Embassy. Letters and faxes supporting the release of
Fr. Jean-Juste have come from all over the US, Canada,
France, Italy and South Africa!

For people who have not yet sent a message, please
try to fax in a letter in the next 48 hours and Bill
will deliver it along with the rest.

There is growing support for his release world-wide.
In the U.S. Congress, Rep. Maxine Waters has worked hard to get
many Representatives to join her call for the release
of Fr. Jean-Juste.

Sample letter:

Fax number is 1-504-861-5440.

Deadline
is 6pm Sunday Central Time.

U.S. Ambassador to Haiti c/o Professor Bill Quigley

Loyola University School of Law, Box 902

New Orleans, LA 70118

Dear Ambassador:

Please do everything in your power to secure the
release of Fr. Gerard Jean-Juste. Fr. Jean-Juste has
been recognized as a Prisoner of Conscience by Amnesty
International and Human Rights First. He has been an
outspoken voice for democracy, human rights and the
poor of Haiti. He was arrested by the unelected
government of Haiti after he was attacked in church.
There are no charges against him. I know the U.S. has
much power in Haiti, please use that power and
influence to have Fr. Jean-Juste released from prison.

Signed,

Your Name and Address

For more information about the campaign to release
Fr. Jean-Juste and other political prisoners in Haiti,
please see the website of the Institute for Justice
and Democracy in Haiti, http://www.ijdh.org

For more information about the arrest of Fr.
Jean-Juste, please see:
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0722-08.htm

For Amnesty International’s great report see:
http://www.commondreams.org/news2005/0726-01.htm

For Human Rights First, see:
http://action.humanrightsfirst.org/campaign/Jean_Juste/explanation?

******************************

"No Justice for Haiti's Jean-Juste:

Interim Government Jails an Opposition Leader"

Aina Hunter, Village Voice

Father Jean-Justice has been in jail since July 21.

Haiti's interim government, led by a prime minister hand-picked and hand-fed by
the Bush administration, has seen fit to jail a potential presidential
candidate. Father Gerard Jean-Juste, a Catholic priest, may be the only figure
one large faction of the Fanmi Lavalas party could accept as a candidate in
elections planned for this October and November. Lavalas is the party of exiled
president Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

“We are waiting for Aristide to return. If he approves it, we could support
[Jean-Juste],” Rene Momplaisir recently told the Voice, through a translator,
in a stifling-hot schoolhouse in Cite Soleil. Cite Soleil is a huge
Port-au-Prince slum, whose approximately 250,000 residents overwhelming
identify with Lavalas. Like the three other men who spoke with the Voice in
what amounted to a sort of roundtable, Momplaisir identified himself as a
member of the “Cite Soleil Lavalas cell.”

Jean-Juste was taken away two weeks ago on charges that international aid groups
are calling laughable. Best known for his vocal denouncement of state-sponsored
violence and his decades of work feeding poor children from a church in the
working-class Delmas section of Port-au-Prince, Jean-Juste is accused of
murdering cultural writer Jacques Roche.

Roche, who worked for the Haitian newspaper Le Matin, was kidnapped for ransom
on July 10. Five days later his body was found near Cite Soleil, still wearing
handcuffs and showing signs of torture. He had apparently been shot to death.

Amnesty International has gotten involved, saying Jean-Juste was in Miami at the
time Roche was abducted. He was there to organize a series of protests in front
of the Brazilian consulate for that country's role in a deadly U.N. Cite Soleil
incursion on July 6. Last Thursday, Amnesty issued a report
calling the priest a “prisoner of conscience detained solely because he has
peacefully exercised his right to freedom of expression,” awaiting trial on
“apparently trumped-up charges.”

Reports in the Haitian media, which is largely controlled by anti-Aristide
forces, suggested that Lavalas was behind Roche's death. At his funeral on July
21, Jean-Juste was attacked by an angry crowd of mourners and ultimately
arrested.

Doug Spalding, of the San Francisco-based Haiti Action Committee, saw Jean-Juste
at the local precinct where he and his lawyers were interrogated, and at the
“medieval” National Penitentiary where Juste has been housed ever since. “He's
being held with one cellmate in a windowless cell four feet wide, 12 feet long.
It's hot, dark, grimy. A urine and feces smell permeates. His neck was swollen
and bruised, and when we asked how he was holding up he said, 'Well, I'm
surviving.' He asked for reading material.”

Although Haitian police have beaten Jean-Juste before, Spalding says guards seem
to have shown restraint this time. He says Jean-Juste told him the bruises were
from being attacked by the mourners.

In October, the 59-year-old priest was beaten and snatched out of a rectory
window by masked police while serving free meals to parishioners. No formal
charges were filed, but Prime Minister Gerard Latortue told reporters
Jean-Juste was “associated with people suspected of organizing against the
government.” He was imprisoned for about seven weeks before international
pressure forced his case before a judge; it was dismissed.

Jean-Juste is the most prominent Lavalas leader to be jailed lately, but since
the Latortue government assumed control in February 2004, hundreds of activists
and politicians have been locked up on dubious charges. Among them are former
Prime Minister Yvon Neptune, activist folk singer Anne Auguste, and former
minister of the interior Jocelerme Privert-all of whom have been imprisoned
without trial for months.