Critics of the agency say that the U.N.’s failure to take responsibility for the outbreak has been a public relations nightmare and an insult to the people of Haiti.
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The statement, however, did not present any change in the position that the United Nations is absolutely immune from legal actions.
Months after an natural disaster devastated Haiti in 2010, a deadly new crisis began to unfold: Cholera spread through the wretched tent cities that had become home to thousands of displaced families.
Brian Concannon, executive director of the Boston-based Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti, said advocates for Haitian cholera victims will be watching the U.N.’s actions closely.
The New York Times first reported the story on Thursday, quoting from a confidential report forwarded to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon by a close adviser on August 8.
The secretary-general’s acknowledgment, by contrast, stopped short of saying that the United Nations specifically caused the epidemic.
” ‘Part of the reason we think the outbreak grew so quickly was the Haitian population had no immunity to cholera, ‘ says Daniele Lantagne, an environmental engineer at Tufts University”. Symptoms include diarrhea, vomiting and dehydration. The United States is defending the U.N., since the agency is headquartered in NY.
Alston also argued in his report that, as The New York Times has reported, the U.N.’s cholera eradication program has failed.
United Nations officials have refused for years to acknowledge a role in bringing cholera to Haiti, but suspicions have long fallen on a contingent of United Nations peacekeeping troops from Nepal who arrived after the January 2010 quake that devastated the capital of Port-au-Prince. Until it struck Haiti, the disease had been mostly eliminated in the Western Hemisphere. “This is a groundbreaking first step towards justice”, said Beatrice Lindstrom of the Institute for Justice & Democracy in Haiti (IJDH), which is pursuing a class-action lawsuit against the United Nations to try to force it to accept responsibility for the disaster and to pay compensation.
Lawyers then appealed the ruling and are now awaiting a decision from the court.
“This is a major victory for the thousands of Haitians who have been marching for justice, writing to the U.N.to demand remedies and have brought the U.N.to court”, Beatrice Lindstrom, staff attorney for the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti, the organization that brought a lawsuit against the United Nations over the cholera outbreak, told Humanosphere.
Vanessa Rouzier examines a child suffering cholera symptoms, as his mother watches, inside Haiti’s first permanent cholera center, run by Gheskio Centers, in downtown Port-au-Prince, Haiti.
Dr Renaud Piarroux, a pediatrician who was among the first to sound the alarm over the outbreak of cholera, recently visited the country and reported that the incidence of the disease and the lack of any infrastructure to deal with its spread were still alarming.
“This is a major victory for the thousands of Haitians who have been marching for justice, writing to the United Nations and bringing the United Nations to court”, said Mario Joseph, a Haitian human rights lawyer representing victims of the epidemic. Cholera is endemic in Nepal. Infection rates have been rising every year in Haiti since 2014, as the organization struggles to raise the $2.27 billion it says is needed to eradicate the disease from member states.
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At least 10,000 people have died and hundreds of thousands have been sickened.
