Who Guards the Guardian ULCC By Jean Venel Casséus

In any modern institutional architecture, the fight against corruption rests on a fundamental paradox. The State establishes a body responsible for monitoring the integrity of its own agents, investigating abuses of power, and contributing to the sanctioning of misappropriation of public resources. But a question has always permeated political and legal thought: who monitors the monitor? Who guards the guardian?

In Haiti, this question inevitably arises when discussing the Anti-Corruption Unit (ULCC), an institution entrusted with a mission as noble as it is strategic. Created in the early 2000s in a context of governance reforms encouraged by international partners, the ULCC responded to an undeniable necessity: to provide the Haitian state with a specialized mechanism capable of preventing, detecting, and documenting corrupt practices within public administration. The ambition was clear: restore trust, moralize public management, and embed state action in a culture of accountability.

Twenty years later, the debate is no longer solely about the extent of corruption in Haiti. It now concerns the very credibility of the institution tasked with combating it.

For several years, the ULCC has been producing numerous investigation reports implicating high-ranking officials, public servants, and managers of state institutions. These publications generate an immediate impact in the media space and foster the impression of sustained institutional activity. Public opinion regularly witnesses the exposure of cases presented as evidence of serious administrative irregularities. However, a persistent reality emerges: the transition from administrative accusation to judicial conviction remains exceptional.

Attributing this situation solely to the structural limitations of the Haitian judicial system constitutes a partial explanation. Certainly, justice suffers from chronic delays, material deficiencies, and well-known institutional fragilities. But these constraints do not exhaust the question. Part of the problem also lies in how the anti-corruption institution itself conceives and carries out its mission.

Over time, a perception has taken hold: the ULCC sometimes seems to work more for public opinion than for the judicial outcome of the cases it investigates. The media coverage of certain investigations, the timing of report publications, and the visibility given to administrative accusations give the impression that communicative logic sometimes precedes evidentiary requirements. However, the fight against corruption is not a moral spectacle. It demands technical rigor capable of withstanding the adversarial test of the court.

An investigative institution does not derive its legitimacy from the volume of denunciations produced, but from the legal soundness of its cases. When a widely disseminated report fails to lead to effective prosecutions or collapses before the procedural requirements of justice, the result goes beyond mere administrative failure. It paradoxically contributes to strengthening the impunity it claims to combat. Each poorly prepared case becomes an additional argument for those who challenge the credibility of the anti-corruption fight.