Country-wide policy

Four instruments decide these answers and we could not read any of them

Haiti's official journal, Le Moniteur, is still publishing - its Special No. 47 of 17 September 2026 is in these records - but it has no reachable archive of its own, and the Secrétariat Général du Conseil des Ministres, which hosts the government's collection of laws, did not answer a single request from here. The consequence is specific rather than general. Four instruments between them decide most of what a person moving to Haiti needs to know, and none of them could be read. The decree-law of 26 December 1978 on immigration and emigration is the one the immigration directorate itself cites by article number for the residence permit, and the one the law of 2002 names as imposing that permit at its article 30. The decree of 6 November 1984 on Haitian nationality is where the Constitution has pointed since 2011 for the conditions of naturalisation. The Code Fiscal enacted by decree of 20 January 2023 brings the whole tax code together and is published by the Ministry of Economy and Finance as a 244-page image whose only machine-readable text is a watermark reading "ne pas reproduire". And the decree of 13 March 1963 defines which new undertakings give a foreign shareholder an exemption from the work permit.

Verified with official sourceMonitor - can change2026-10-06

Topics it changes

What it requires

Treat every figure and period on this country as resting on the instrument named beside it, and on nothing later
Expect the decree-law of 26 December 1978 to govern the residence permit in practice, even where this site quotes the 1959 text

At a glance

Décret-loi du 26 décembre 1978 sur l'immigration et l'émigration: Not read
Cited by article number by the immigration directorate and named at article 30 by the law of 12 August 2002. No host we could reach serves it.
Décret du 6 novembre 1984 sur la nationalité haïtienne: Not read
The law the Constitution points at for the acquisition of Haitian nationality since the 2011 amendment.
Code Fiscal, décret du 20 janvier 2023: Published as an unreadable image
Le Moniteur Spécial No. 3 of 20 January 2023, 244 pages. The Ministry's own file yields only a repeated watermark.
Décret du 13 mars 1963: Not read
Defines the new undertakings whose shareholders article 312(a) of the Labour Code exempts from the work permit.
Le Moniteur's own archive: None we could reach
Issues were read as files hosted by ministries and by a document archive, not from the gazette.

What the law says

Read off a scan - not machine-verifiedDécret du 20 janvier 2023 portant Code Fiscal · The whole document, as published

«ne pa s re pro »

Our translation - not official

do not reproduce

This is not an extract from the Code. It is the whole of the machine-readable text the Ministry's 244-page file contains: a watermark repeated across every page. No article of the Code Fiscal can be quoted, checked or even listed from what its own publisher serves.

Read off a scan - not machine-verifiedLoi du 12 août 2002, considérant · Considérant

«telle l'obligation qui leur est faite par l'Article 30 du Décret du 26 décembre 1978 sur l'Immigration et l'Emigration;»

Our translation - not official

such as the obligation imposed on them by Article 30 of the Decree of 26 December 1978 on Immigration and Emigration;

Evidence that the 1978 decree-law exists and what its article 30 does. We could not obtain the decree-law itself.

Practical notes

This record exists so that no absence on this country is read as a finding about Haitian law. Where a topic here says we found nothing, that statement is bounded by the instruments actually read and named in each record, and the four above are not among them.

The Secrétariat Général du Conseil des Ministres hosts the laws we most wanted, including the immigration law and the 2002 privileges law, at sgcm.gouv.ht. Every request to that host from here failed to connect, through the extraction service and directly, over both http and https. That is a fact about our access and not about the site.

Where a Haitian instrument could only be read as a file served by a document archive rather than by the State, the records say so and the publisher is typed as an archive.

Last verified

2026-10-06

Re-read on a cadence set by the publisher, not the calendar. How we check

Sources2 · all accessed 2026-10-06

issues
Décret du 20 janvier 2023 portant Code Fiscal (Code Général des Impôts et Livre des Procédures Fiscales)
Ministère de l'Économie et des Finances d'Haïti
About this source
Haiti's finance ministry, and one of only two Haitian state hosts that answered a request from here. It serves issues of Le Moniteur as PDFs from its own storage, including the Décret du 29 septembre 2005 relatif à l'impôt sur le revenu (Spécial No. 10 of 5 October 2005) and the Code Fiscal of 20 January 2023 (Spécial No. 3). What is quoted from it is the gazette's own artefact rather than a reproduction.
Standing: Issues the instrument
Cannot be cited for: Its files are scans. The 2005 income tax decree carries an embedded text layer that is a machine recognition - it prints "Article S.-" for article 5 and "IMP6T" for impôt - and that reading stops inside article 126 although the decree runs further, so nothing it serves can support a claim about what an instrument does not contain. The Code Fiscal of 2023 is worse: 244 pages whose only machine-readable text is the watermark "ne pas reproduire", so not one of its articles can be quoted or even listed. It is not a consolidator and publishes no index: a file is found by knowing its storage path, so the absence of an instrument here is never evidence that it does not exist.
We re-read it every 90 days. More about this source
reports
Loi portant privilèges accordés aux Haïtiens d'origine jouissant d'une autre nationalité et à leurs descendants, Le Moniteur 157e année No. 65, 12 août 2002
HaitiDocs (facsimile of Le Moniteur)
About this source
A Haiti document archive holding about five thousand items - central bank circulars, customs statistics, electoral council decrees, and facsimiles of Le Moniteur going back to 1959. Used here because Haiti's own law collection at sgcm.gouv.ht would not answer a single request and Le Moniteur has no reachable archive of its own. What it serves for the instruments quoted here is the gazette's or the State Printing Office's own page image, so the artefact is the State's even though the host is not.
Standing: Reports, establishes nothing
Cannot be cited for: It is not the publisher of record and must never be cited where a Haitian government host serves the same file. It does no amendment tracking, so nothing taken from it is evidence that a text is current - the 1959 immigration law quoted here is known to have been overtaken at least in part by a 1978 decree-law we could not obtain. Its catalogue metadata is not reliable: it dates the immigration law "8 juillet 1959" where the document's own title page says 8 December 1959, and it attributes the Labour Code to the justice ministry when the PDF carries haitijustice.com as a watermark on every page. That Labour Code edition also replaces four articles - 426, 483, 505 and 507 to 510 - with a bracketed editorial summary instead of their text, so it cannot support a claim that the Code is silent on something.
We re-read it every 90 days. More about this source