S., from Haiti, asked the French Office for the Protection of Refugees and Stateless Persons (OFPRA) to review his application for asylum after his initial application had been rejected by a decision of the National Court of Asylum (CNDA) of 25 November 2002, which had become final. By decision of 17 March 2025, OFPRA rejected the request for review. S. appealed this rejection before the CNDA. S. argued that he feared being exposed to persecution or serious harm, if returned to Haiti, due to the deteriorating security situation in his country, without being able to benefit from the effective protection of the authorities. He argued that he was originally from Saint-Louis-du-Sud, he lived between that municipality and Port-au-Prince on his return to the country in 2009, before definitively leaving Haiti in 2016 because of the general insecurity and stated that after his departure, his partner and two children settled in 2022 in Port-au-Prince where, in August 2023, an armed gang inflicted severe abuse on them and set their homes on fire. Living in a very precarious situation in French Guiana, he was unable to provide for them and feared for his safety if he returned to his country of origin.
By judgment of 31 July 2026, the CNDA rejected the appeal.
The CNDA cited its previous Grand Chamber decision no 23035187 of 5 December 2023, to note that the clashes between rival armed criminal groups in Haiti and those groups with the Haitian National Police, or even with self-defence groups were considered an internal armed conflict and the entire Haitian territory suffers a situation of indiscriminate violence resulting from an internal armed conflict, this violence reaches Port-au-Prince in the departments of the West and Artibonite, as well as in the bordering part of the Department of the Centre, which concentrate the largest number of clashes, security incidents and victims, an exceptional level of intensity.
The court further noted that S. was born in Saint-Louis-du-Sud, in the southern region and may have resided in Port-au-Prince during his studies, where he has returned very regularly to exploit family farmland since the death of his father. While he claimed, in support of his request for review, that his partner, also from Saint-Louis-du-Sud, moved to Port-au-Prince in 2022 in order to send their two children to school there, the court considered his statements to be evasive. The court thus considered that S. retained most of his family ties and material interests in Saint-Louis-du-Sud.
The CNDA used data from GPS navigation tools (googlemaps, mapcarta), air ticket booking (kayak.fr, skyscanner.com) and real-time monitoring of air flights (flightradar24) to conclude that Saint-Louis-du-Sud, located in the Southern Department, where a situation of indiscriminate violence not reaching exceptional intensity prevailed, could be reached by land from Les Cayes Airport, which is connected by several daily connections to Cap-Haïtien International Airport, in the North Department, where a situation of indiscriminate violence reaching exceptional intensity did not prevail, and was accessible from Cayenne Airport by transiting through the airports of Fort-de-France, Pointe-à-Pitre, Fort Lauderdale International or Miami International.
Thus, the court concluded that the claim that S. made that, in the event of return to Haiti, he had to necessarily pass through an area marked by indiscriminate violence of exceptional intensity, was not warranted since he did not prove that he would be specifically affected, on account of individual factors. On the contrary, the court noted that S. referred only to general considerations, insufficient to consider that he would be particularly and personally exposed to a risk of suffering serious harm if he were to return to Saint-Louis-du-Sud.
The court thus rejected the request for subsidiary protection.