OBITUARIES / PASSINGS / Rev. Gerard Jean-Juste
The Rev. Gerard Jean-Juste, 62, an influential Haitian Roman Catholic priest who fought for his countrymen’s rights in the U.S., died Wednesday in a Miami-area hospital of complications from a stroke and a lung problem.
Jean-Juste, who was born in Cavaillon, Haiti, came to the U.S. as a young man and founded the Haitian Refugee Center in Miami in the late 1970s.
When the U.S. government began to systematically deport Haitian immigrants, he fought to ensure that they received due process for asylum consideration, immigration attorney Ira Kurzban said, adding that it was in part Jean-Juste’s activism that enabled Haitian asylum seekers to obtain work permits for the first time.
Jean-Juste returned to Haiti in the early 1990s and was a prominent supporter of former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
After Aristide left the country during a bloody coup in 2004, the U.S.-backed interim government jailed Jean-Juste in connection with the killing of a prominent Haitian journalist and poet.
International human rights groups maintained that the charges were politically motivated, and eventually they were dropped.
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