The age of consent in Haiti is 15. Anyone who engages in sexual activity with a person under that age can be sentenced to fifteen years of forced labor, and the penalty rises to life imprisonment in aggravated cases. The threshold was formalized when President Jovenel Moïse signed a revised Penal Code by decree on March 1, 2020, lowering the age from 16 to 15 over objections from lawmakers and religious groups.1U.S. Department of State. Report on International Religious Freedom: Haiti The older amended code, still operative through most of the period since 2005, produced the same practical result by attaching sharply increased penalties to sexual offenses against children under 15.
No Close-in-Age Exception
Haitian law contains no “Romeo and Juliet” provision. The line at 15 is absolute. A 16-year-old who has sexual contact with a 14-year-old is technically in violation of the law, just as an adult would be. No statutory language reduces or excuses the offense based on a small age gap between the parties.
Penalties for Sexual Offenses Against Minors
Rape and Aggravated Rape
Article 278 of the amended Criminal Code defines rape as a sexual assault carried out through violence, threats, surprise, or psychological pressure. The baseline sentence is ten years of hard labor. Under Article 279, when the victim is under 15, the sentence increases to fifteen years of forced labor. The victim’s age alone triggers the harsher penalty; no separate element of force needs to be proven beyond the sexual act itself.
The penalty rises to life imprisonment when the offender is a parent, guardian, or someone who abused a position of official authority, when the offender acted with accomplices, or when the victim died as a result of the crime.2GOV.UK. Haiti: Information for Victims of Rape and Sexual Assault
Corruption of Morals
Article 281 separately criminalizes encouraging or facilitating the sexual corruption of anyone under 18. This is a broader offense than rape, reaching conduct such as promoting prostitution or systematically exposing a young person to sexual situations. The standard penalty is six months to two years of imprisonment. When the offender is the victim’s parent, guardian, or caretaker, the sentence increases to one to three years.
Buying Sex From a Minor
Article 384 of the 2020 code makes it a crime to solicit or obtain sexual services from a minor in exchange for payment or a promise of payment. The penalty is two to three years of imprisonment and a fine of 50,000 to 100,000 gourdes. The same penalties apply when the victim is a particularly vulnerable adult. The older code lacked specific language targeting buyers of sex from minors, so this provision only becomes fully operative once the 2020 code takes effect.
Marriage Is the One Carve-Out
Haiti’s Civil Code sets the minimum marriage age at 18 for males and 15 for females.3Law Library of Congress. Marriage Under Haitian Law Parental consent is required for sons under 25 and daughters under 21. The President of Haiti can also grant dispensations allowing marriage below the minimum ages for “serious reasons,” so there is technically no absolute floor when a presidential waiver is issued.
Marriage is the only mechanism in Haitian law that can override the age-of-consent threshold. When a girl marries at 15, sexual activity within that marriage is not treated as a criminal offense under the consent laws. The carve-out applies only inside the marital relationship itself.
Haiti has no national strategy or action plan to address child marriage, and the legal minimum for girls remains at 15 with the dispensation available.
Which Version of the Code Is Actually in Force
The 2020 decree included a transition period before the new code would take effect and repeal the older code. It was originally scheduled to enter force on June 24, 2022. That date passed without implementation. The government pushed the effective date to June 24, 2024, and when that deadline arrived, the transitional government postponed it again to June 2025, citing the inactive legislature and the need for executive action by decree.
This matters because the older Penal Code, amended by decrees in 2005 and 2008, contains the specific articles most commonly cited in Haitian criminal practice, including Articles 278 through 282 discussed above. Whether the 2020 code’s revisions are fully in effect depends on whether the latest implementation deadline was met, which Haiti’s ongoing political instability makes difficult to confirm. On the age of consent itself, both versions land in the same place at 15.
Enforcement on the Ground
The law on paper and the law in practice are not the same thing in Haiti. Since the assassination of President Moïse in July 2021, the country has gone through periods with no functioning legislature, limited judicial capacity, and widespread gang violence that has overwhelmed law enforcement in many areas. The repeated postponement of the 2020 Penal Code is itself a symptom of that institutional breakdown. Anyone assessing legal rights or criminal exposure in Haiti should treat the statutory penalties above as what the law says should happen, not a reliable prediction of what will happen in any given case.