Haiti's LGBT+ Activists Are Sceptical About December's Elections — and About What Follows

Haiti’s Provisional Electoral Council, appointed in 2024, has set the country’s next presidential election for Sunday 13 December. Haitians will elect a new parliament the same day, with a possible runoff already scheduled for 21 February 2027. It would be the first national vote in roughly ten years, in a country governed by interim leaders and successive transitional councils since the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse in 2021.

Among Haitian LGBT+ organisers, the response has been less anticipation than a set of hard practical questions — about whether the vote can happen, and about what a campaign season does to people who are already exposed.

Whether it can happen at all

Armed groups control somewhere between 70 and 90 percent of Port-au-Prince, depending on the estimate. Voter registration, campaigning and the physical operation of polling stations are difficult or impossible across large parts of the country. About 1,000 international troops are deployed under a UN-backed Gang Suppression Force, a number that observers widely describe as insufficient for the territory involved.

The violence has not eased while the electoral calendar was being drawn up. On the night of 23–24 August, in Kenscoff in the hills above the capital, armed groups executed 47 people and wounded 22 more, according to the United Nations.

Johnny Clergé, executive director of the Port-au-Prince organisation Arc-En-Ciel d’Haïti, put the logistical problem plainly in remarks to Erasing 76 Crimes: “Voter rolls need to be finalized, and voters must have their voter ID cards to cast their ballots. Logistically speaking, and given the current context, I have serious doubts about the country’s ability to hold free and transparent elections.”

The candidate field is not yet known. The Provisional Electoral Council has not released a list of registered presidential candidates; declarations are due by 20 September.

What elections have historically meant

Clergé’s second concern is one every Haitian LGBT+ organiser raises without prompting. “Elections are traditionally a time when homophobia spikes sharply in Haiti,” he said. Campaign season creates demand for a cheap unifying enemy, and in Haiti as elsewhere, that demand tends to get met the same way.

What is different this cycle is the delivery mechanism. Guillaume Guy-Luly, an attorney for the Trans Organization of Haiti (OTRAH), pointed to online agitators broadcasting incitements in Haitian Creole — including explicit calls to burn gay people — on platforms with little or no Creole-language moderation. OTRAH’s executive director Dominique Xavier Saint-Vil made the same argument in print earlier this year, criticising YouTube for allowing unrestricted distribution of homophobic and transphobic content in a language its systems effectively do not police.

Guy-Luly himself now lives in Miami, having left Haiti for security reasons, and said he will not be voting in December. That is its own data point: the people best placed to do candidate advocacy are, in a number of cases, no longer in the country.

Where the law stands

Haiti does not criminalise same-sex sexual conduct. That is the starting point for any discussion of Haitian LGBT+ rights, and it matters — it puts Haiti in a different category from the majority of Caribbean jurisdictions that retain colonial-era sodomy provisions.

But the absence of a criminal prohibition is not the same as protection, and the recent legislative record runs the wrong way. In 2025 Haiti adopted a new penal code, the first comprehensive revision in 190 years. The final text left out a proposal that would have made sexual orientation an aggravating circumstance in other crimes, and it excluded homophobia and transphobia from the definition of discrimination altogether. Those omissions were the result of sustained pressure, including from evangelical networks in the Florida-based Haitian diaspora.

So a trans woman attacked in Port-au-Prince is not committing a crime by existing, and the person who attacks her is not committing an aggravated one. That is the legal position going into December.

What activists do still point to is Article 19 of the 1987 Constitution, which obliges the state to guarantee “the right to life, to health, and to respect for the human person to all citizens without distinction.” Clergé cited it directly. It remains in force, and in a country where the state’s capacity to guarantee anything is contested, it is the strongest textual hook available.

What organisers say they need to do

The strategic argument coming out of Haitian LGBT+ groups is about coalition rather than visibility. Clergé’s position is that the community cannot absorb a campaign season alone: “They must form a coalition with other civil society organizations to prevent messages of hate from dominating the entire public discourse, including on social media.”

Merlin Jean, executive director of Héritage pour la Protection des Droits Humains, based in Ouanaminthe in the north-east, framed the election as an opening rather than a threat — but a narrow one, and one that requires work nobody has yet started. “The upcoming election must serve as a catalyst for sustained advocacy efforts with the candidates, which involves identifying key figures within the political parties,” he said. The issues he named were not identity-specific: access to health care, education and justice, and formal recognition of civil society organisations as actors. “If we don’t do this, the LGBT+ activist community will be further weakened.”

Clergé confirmed that as of now, Haitian LGBT+ organisations have not seriously begun advocacy targeting candidates — which, with candidate declarations closing on 20 September, leaves a narrow window.

The next three months

The questions that will be answered by December are sequential. Whether a credible candidate list emerges by the 20th. Whether registration and polling can be organised in areas under armed group control. Whether any candidate is prepared to say anything about civil society protections, in either direction. And whether the online incitement that activists are already documenting escalates as the vote approaches.

None of that is within the control of the organisations named here, all of which are small, underfunded and operating in a country where basic movement is dangerous. What is within their control is the coalition work Clergé described, and the documentation OTRAH and others have been doing on Creole-language incitement — which will matter whether or not the election happens on schedule, because the platforms carrying it are not going anywhere.

Haitian LGBT+ people can vote. Getting the conditions in which that means something is the longer project, and December is one step in it rather than the end of one.