On Thursday, Aug. 18, the United Nations made its first acknowledgment of its possible involvement in the introduction of cholera to Haiti six years ago that United Nations figures showed has killed more than 9,000 Haitians and infected 770,000.
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Scientific studies have confirmed that Haiti’s cholera outbreak can be traced back to a single event after the 2010 quake.
Haq added that that the finding calls for a “significant new set of United Nations actions” and that a “new response will be presented publicly within the next two months”.
The admission comes after the Times obtained a confidential report authored by New York University professor of law Philip Alston, an adviser the UN.
The court ruling means the United Nations is protected by diplomatic immunity from compensation claims by families of the victims.
The statement from deputy spokesman Farhan Haq follows Thursday’s statement in which the United Nations said for the first time that it was involved in the introduction of cholera to Haiti and needs to do “much more” to end the suffering of those who contracted the disease, estimated at more than 800,000 people.
“I don’t believe that this is something that we’re describing one way or another as reparations”, Mr Haq said, “our legal position on this issue has not changed since the last times that we’ve been discussing this [sic]”.
Already one of the world’s poorest countries, Haiti was still reeling from a devastating natural disaster on January 12, 2010 that killed more than 200,000 people when its misery was compounded by the cholera outbreak.
“This is a groundbreaking first step towards justice”, said Beatrice Lindstrom of the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti (IJDH), which is pursuing a class-action lawsuit against the UN. Cholera victims suffer from dehydration caused by severe diarrhea or vomiting; numerous Haitians afflicted with the water-borne disease were already in a weakened state following the quake and the loss of their homes. He welcomes the new statements from the U.N. Secretary General’s office but says the organization still “clearly did not definitively take responsibility for introducing cholera”. However, the decision could be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. Untreated waste from the peacekeepers’ base was discharged into a nearby river and, in short order, Haitians in nearby villages began to get sick and die.
United Nations chief Ban Ki-moon, in a statement by a spokesman, also noted that a decision Thursday by a USA federal appeals court “upheld the immunity of the organization from legal proceedings” brought against it over the cholera crisis.
Even now, six years after the initial outbreak of cholera in Haiti, the disease still flares up and kills people.
“We will decide how to proceed based on whether the UN’s actions fulfil the cholera victims’ rights to an effective remedy”, Concannon said in a statement.
Cholera is an acute gastrointestinal illness caused by ingesting food or drink contaminated with Vibrio cholerae bacteria.
In December 2012, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon announced a $2.27 billion initiative to help eradicate cholera in Haiti and the neighboring Dominican Republic, which share the island of Hispaniola.
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According to the UN, Some 72 percent of Haitians have no toilets at home and 42 percent still lack access to drinking water.
