AAAS Scientific Responsibility, Human Rights and Law Program

Assistance to the Haitian National Commission for Truth and Justice (CNVJ)

 
April 1995-January 1996

In early May 1995, Francoise Bouchard, President of the Haitian National Commission for Truth and Justice (La commission nationale pour la vérité et justice, CNVJ), invited the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) to advise the commission on how to develop a large-scale interviewing project to take the testimonies of a several thousand witnesses of human rights violations. The AAAS team met with the CNVJ commissioners and planned a project to include 40 interviewer teams, ten data processors, and five data entry specialists. The interviewing was to be done in July and August 1995, and the report produced by mid-December 1995. The commission’s final report was given to President Aristide in February 1996, but because of policy disagreements in the Haitian government, it was not published until September 1996.

The CNVJ team took 5,453 interviews. In all, they identified 8,667 victims who suffered 18,629 violations. The CNVJ interviewing was quite good by scientific standards. A data processing group composed of eleven of the interviewers applied standard definitions to the raw interview data and produced detailed regional analyses, incorporating qualitative material from the interviews, as well as historical, economic and demographic analysis. Unfortunately, in the last stages of the process, the commissioners discarded almost all the work done by the field investigators and substituted a chronology of the de facto regime. The commissioners never informed the AAAS of their reasons for not using the regional data; although the statistical analyses were presented, the tables omitted most of the content and the translations into French were inadequate. Thus, observers should not judge the quality of the field research by the AAAS team for the CNVJ on the basis of the published official report.

Additional Information

CNVJ report
Methodological reflections on work at the CNVJ