Haiti declared independence in 1804 after an uprising of enslaved people, but almost no country recognised it for decades. In 1825 France sent a fleet to Haitian waters and set a condition: France would recognise the independence if Haiti paid an indemnity to French plantation owners for lost property — property counted as including the very people who had been enslaved.

The initial figure was 150 million gold francs, later reduced to 90 million, and to pay it Haiti had to borrow from French banks, creating a debt layered on the indemnity. Haiti paid over roughly 122 years, into the mid-twentieth century. Economic studies give differing figures but all conclude the payments extracted a very large share of the country's resources for over a century.

It became the second independent state in the Americas after the United States and the first republic in the world founded by formerly enslaved Black people. It is the only large-scale slave uprising in history to have founded an independent state. Haiti's early constitutions permanently abolished slavery and opened nationality to people from enslaved groups who came to settle.

In 2013 the Dominican Constitutional Court reinterpreted the rules on citizenship by birth, applying the change retroactively to 1929 and excluding children of people residing without valid documentation. Tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands born and raised there, mostly of Haitian descent and many in the second or third generation, were left without any nationality. A 2014 law provided partial remedy.

When assessing how secure a nationality is, do not look only at the law in force — ask how long that provision has been interpreted consistently and whether there is precedent for retroactive reinterpretation. This is the fourteenth mechanism producing statelessness in this library, and the only judicial one rather than executive or legislative.

Yes, since the 2011 constitutional amendment — it did not before. The change was driven by the scale of the Haitian community abroad. But the constitution restricts holders of another nationality from certain public offices, the same class of restriction recorded in Guyana and Kyrgyzstan.

It is one of two official languages alongside French, and is spoken by essentially the entire population while French is used fluently by a far smaller proportion. But Haitian Creole was only recognised as official in the 1987 constitution — before that, although the mother tongue of the whole country, it held no official status, and that in itself was a barrier to accessing rights.

An organised belief system formed from the combination of West African religious traditions and Catholicism, with its own liturgy, structure and ethics, officially recognised as a religion in Haiti since 2003. The image Western cinema created of Vodou is a distortion and has caused real prejudice against Haitians for decades.