On September 21, 2026, Pierre Espérance — executive director of Haiti’s Réseau National de Défense des Droits Humains (RNDDH), and one of the country’s longest-standing and most threatened human rights defenders — sat down with Volcy Assad on “Le Rendez-Vous” to react to a major development: the extradition of Joseph Félix Badio and 17 Colombian nationals to Miami to face U.S. federal charges in the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse. What he said, even filtered through a badly degraded transcript, maps onto a real and important legal question: what does it mean when a country’s own justice system cannot finish a case, and another country’s system does the finishing for it?
Part 1: What Espérance Appears to Be Saying
Several distinct threads emerge from the interview:
A verdict on Haitian justice, delivered as shame. Espérance describes the extradition of Badio and the Colombians to the U.S. as “yon ront pou lajistis ayisyèn” — a shame, or embarrassment, for Haitian justice specifically. His framing is not that the extradition is wrong, but that it is a public admission of failure: after five years, Haiti’s own judicial process has not produced a trial, while the American process — operating in parallel since 2021 — has produced arrests, prosecutions, and convictions. He describes Haitian justice as having been “malad” (sick) since Moïse’s death, and getting sicker with each subsequent political decision.
A claim of institutional foresight. Espérance repeatedly asserts that RNDDH said, as early as 2021 — before Badio’s arrest — that the network eventually charged in the conspiracy was the one that produced the assassination. This is consistent with RNDDH’s actual public record: the organization has been vocal on the Moïse case since immediately after the killing, and Espérance himself was reportedly the target of an assassination-planning meeting in 2022 tied partly to RNDDH’s position on the case.
A specific, verifiable claim about Samir Handal. Espérance states that Handal — the businessman who rented the Delmas 60 residence where the plotters allegedly met — was arrested in Turkey, and was central enough to the conspiracy that he knew what was happening across the plot’s different cells. This checks out against the public record: Handal was detained at Istanbul airport in November 2021 on an Interpol Red Notice, spent months in Turkish custody, and has been reported by Turkish legal counsel as having been extradited in connection with the case. The transcript’s account of his arrest lines up with contemporaneous reporting closely enough to lend credibility to the rest of Espérance’s account, even where the transcript itself is unreliable.
A question about financing. Espérance raises the $340,000 figure reportedly spent on the operation, questioning aloud whether that sum is even plausible as the full cost of financing an assassination of this scale — implying either more money moved through channels investigators haven’t traced, or that the publicly known financing picture is incomplete. He references bank transactions and an American company allegedly implicated in the plot, consistent with reporting that has long suggested the financing and planning crossed Haitian, American, and Dominican territory.
A pointed critique of the 2024 prison releases. Espérance alludes to the National Penitentiary being emptied in early March 2024 — the period when the Viv Ansanm gang coalition stormed Haiti’s main prisons — and appears to connect this to a broader argument about impunity taking root in Haiti’s justice system, though the transcript is too degraded here to support a specific factual allegation about who ordered what.
A structural complaint about the judiciary and the CPT. He criticizes a decree issued under the Transition Presidential Council (CPT) and the government touching judicial reform and defamation law, arguing it entrenched impunity rather than reducing it, and separately criticizes what appears to be Haiti’s Conseil Supérieur du Pouvoir Judiciaire (the body responsible for judicial discipline) for sitting on cases for months without producing rulings.
An emotional, rhetorical address to the late president. Near the end of the audible portion, Espérance appears to shift into direct, second-person address — “Jounèl Moïse… ou te wè sa?” (“Jovenel Moïse… did you see this?”) — a rhetorical device common in Haitian political commentary, used here to underscore the human stakes behind years of legal paralysis.
The unresolved core question. Espérance repeatedly circles back to one question without fully answering it in the available transcript: does Haiti actually benefit from this case moving into the American system, or does outsourcing the prosecution mean Haiti loses the ability to establish, on its own authority, who ordered the killing of its own president?
That last question is the real hinge of the interview — and it’s also a genuine, well-posed legal question. Understanding why is a matter of jurisdiction.
Part 2: The Jurisdictional Anatomy of the Moïse Case
Three distinct jurisdictional questions are doing different work in this case, and Espérance’s unease is really a reaction to how the U.S. answered the third one.
Subject Matter Jurisdiction — does a U.S. federal court have authority to hear this kind of case at all? Ordinarily, a U.S. federal court has no business trying a murder committed in Port-au-Prince against a Haitian head of state. What gives the Southern District of Florida subject matter jurisdiction here is that Congress wrote specific federal statutes — 18 U.S.C. § 2339A (material support resulting in death) and § 956(a) (conspiracy to kill or kidnap a person outside the United States) — with explicit extraterritorial reach. These statutes were built precisely for cases like this one: conspiracies that plan violence abroad but that touch U.S. territory, U.S. persons, or U.S. financial systems in their execution. The charges add wire fraud and money laundering conspiracy counts tied to the alleged use of Paycheck Protection Program and Economic Injury Disaster Loan funds — U.S. federal pandemic relief money — to help finance the plot. That financing link is not incidental; it’s likely the single strongest hook giving U.S. courts subject matter jurisdiction over a foreign assassination, because it transforms the case from “a killing in Haiti” into “a fraud on the U.S. Treasury that financed a killing in Haiti.”
Personal Jurisdiction — does the court have authority over these specific defendants? In criminal law, this is a lower bar than people often assume. Once a defendant is physically present before the court — regardless of how they got there, whether through lawful extradition, deportation, or even a legally contested transfer — American courts generally hold that personal jurisdiction attaches. This is sometimes called the Ker-Frisbie doctrine, after two Supreme Court cases establishing that the manner of a defendant’s presence in court doesn’t defeat the court’s jurisdiction over them once they’re there. That’s why the “elite FBI and HSI team” physically flying 18 defendants from Haiti to Miami matters as a jurisdictional event, not just a logistical one: it’s the act that completes personal jurisdiction over those 18 people, whatever the eventual legal disputes about the extradition process itself.
Geographic (Territorial) Jurisdiction — whose crime is this, geographically? Under classical international law, the territoriality principle would give Haiti exclusive jurisdiction — the killing happened at Moïse’s residence, on Haitian soil, and territorial sovereignty is usually the strongest and most traditional basis for criminal jurisdiction. But territoriality isn’t the only recognized basis in international law. The U.S. is asserting jurisdiction here under a combination of the protective principle (crimes that threaten a state’s fundamental interests, including its financial and security systems) and specific congressional grants of extraterritorial authority tied to concrete U.S. nexus points: alleged planning meetings held partly in Florida, an American company allegedly implicated in the conspiracy, and the diversion of U.S. federal funds. This produces concurrent jurisdiction — both Haiti and the U.S. have a legitimate legal claim to prosecute, for different but overlapping reasons. That overlap is exactly what makes Espérance’s question a real one, not just a rhetorical complaint: when two sovereigns both have a valid jurisdictional claim, which one actually gets to write the historical and legal record of who killed Jovenel Moïse?
Part 3: How Two Judicial Systems Actually Cooperate
The image circulated by Michèle Duvalier is itself a useful primary document here: it’s a communiqué from Haiti’s Ministry of Justice and Public Security, explicitly invoking the extradition mechanisms established between the Republic of Haiti and the United States, issued at the request of American authorities, authorizing the transfer of the accused individuals “to allow for their judgment,” while stating this is meant to help establish the facts and identify responsibilities, with respect for judicial guarantees and free from any influence.
That communiqué also states something quietly significant: it confirms that two separate procedures had been running in parallel — one in Haiti, one in the United States — and that while the American procedure had produced significant progress, including arrests, prosecutions, and convictions, the Haitian procedure remained mired in serious difficulties and had not, after five years, produced a trial. That is the Haitian government’s own official acknowledgment of precisely the failure Espérance is describing in the interview — which is worth noting, because it means Espérance’s criticism and the government’s own stated justification for the extradition are, on this point, not actually in conflict.
Mechanically, this kind of cross-border cooperation runs through several possible channels, and this case appears to have used more than one: bilateral extradition arrangements between Haiti and the U.S. (invoked directly in the Ministry of Justice communiqué); Interpol Red Notices, which is how Turkey identified and detained Samir Handal on a layover in 2021 based on a Haitian arrest request; and, for evidence rather than bodies, formal requests for judicial assistance — letters rogatory or mutual legal assistance mechanisms — through which U.S. prosecutors can obtain bank records, witness statements, and physical evidence located in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, or Colombia, even without a full MLAT in place. The Haitian communiqué’s own language — noting that information and evidence gathered through this cooperation “could also contribute to deepening investigations in Haiti” — suggests the Haitian government is trying to frame this less as ceding the case entirely and more as a reciprocal arrangement, where U.S.-gathered evidence eventually flows back to strengthen Haiti’s own dormant prosecution. Whether that actually happens in practice is an open question — and it’s the practical version of exactly what Espérance is pressing on.
Part 4: Why Would Michèle Duvalier Say This?
Michèle Bennett Duvalier’s tweet — “Our Country is run by the American Government and by the gangs” — is worth reading carefully rather than dismissing, because it’s tapping into a sentiment that, as this interview shows, isn’t confined to any one political faction in Haiti. Pierre Espérance, a human rights defender who has spent decades documenting abuses by Duvalierist-era networks and their successors, and Michèle Duvalier, the widow of Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, are approaching this from radically different political histories — and yet both are, in their own way, voicing the same underlying anxiety: that Haiti’s institutions are no longer the ones determining Haiti’s fate.
Several readings of her comment are reasonable, and they aren’t mutually exclusive. It can be read as a straightforward expression of wounded national sovereignty — a sentiment genuinely widespread in Haiti right now, where citizens watch a foreign-led security mission attempt to do what the national police cannot, and now watch a foreign court try to deliver the accountability the national justice system could not, in the same week. It can also be read, given her family’s specific political history, as an attempt to position Duvalierist nationalism — historically built on rhetoric of Haitian self-determination against foreign interference, even as the Duvalier regime itself depended heavily on U.S. Cold War backing — as newly relevant to a public frustrated with both gang rule and international intervention. And it can be read simply as opportunistic political commentary, amplifying a real and resonant public grievance to a French-speaking diaspora audience, regardless of the tweet’s deeper motive.
What can be said with more confidence is this: her framing and Espérance’s framing, despite coming from opposite ends of Haiti’s political history, are functionally making the same argument — that a state which cannot prosecute the murder of its own president, and cannot control the streets of its own capital, has ceded something more than just a single case file. Where they would presumably part ways is on the remedy. Espérance’s decades of advocacy point toward strengthening independent Haitian institutions — the judiciary, the CSPJ, prosecutorial capacity — so Haiti never needs another country to finish its own cases again. Duvalier’s tweet offers no such remedy; it names the grievance and stops there, which is itself worth noting as a meaningful difference between a human rights advocate’s critique and a political actor’s applause line.
The Bottom Line
Pierre Espérance’s core argument is not that the U.S. prosecution is illegitimate — it’s that its necessity is itself the indictment. Jurisdictionally, the U.S. has a real and defensible claim to this case through Congress’s extraterritorial statutes and the PPP/EIDL financing link; personal jurisdiction over the transported defendants is now settled by their physical presence in Miami; and Haiti’s own Ministry of Justice has expressly authorized this cooperation through the two countries’ extradition mechanisms. But none of that resolves the deeper question Espérance is actually asking: whether a justice process built and controlled almost entirely outside Haiti can still produce a result Haitians experience as their own justice — or whether, five years on, accountability for killing a Haitian president has simply become one more thing Haiti has had to outsource.
