Wednesday, June 17, 2009
The Haitian Constitution, pg. 191
This chapter is the haitian Constitution written in 1805. It shows how the Haitians wanted change in certain aspects of life, such as freedom of religion. However, there are many flaws that make it not surprising that the country broke up soon after this was written. Many laws are extremely strict. "Every citizen must know a mechanical trade" is strict and hard to enforce. "In cases of bakruptcy or business failure, Haitian citizenship is suspended" This surely eliminated the desire for many people to be entrepreneurs, and thus hurt the economy. And the law that those who commit corporal or disgraceful crimes lose citizenship is also very strict. Also, some laws are too vague and would be difficult to enforce. "No one is worthy of being a Haitian if he is not a good father, a good husband, and above all, a good soldier." What is the definition of a good father? This is so vague that many arguments would occur about cases of people accused of this. "He who kills his fellow man deserves to die" This does not say if the man actually is supposed to receive the death penalty or not. This to would cause much debate, because it's a life or death situation.
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I wrote about many of the same things. I thought that the laws about bankruptcy were hardcore. Imagine if this was in place today in the America! And let's just face it, some people are just not mechanically inclined, especially if they were not associated with this kind of thing growing up. As you said, very hard to enforce and very hard to meet the requirements of the nation. I did, however really like their lenient laws on religion and marriage. It is very different from anything we have read up to now where catholicism seems to have been dominant. It was also good to see that they were promoting education by building schools. We have to understand that the people writing this were probably not very inclined to writing legal documents.... they would not have had much practice leading up to this atleast.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you that the punishment for failure business was very harsh. First, the former slaves might want to try trading but they don't really have any experiences. We can anticipate some failures and bankruptcy in the market because of this reason. Besides, Haiti was a new nation during that time. They didn't really have a stable economic condition. It was hard for the citizens to do business without expecting loss, and receive a hardcore punishment.
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