Tuesday, February 26, 2013

The Guardian: UN will not compensate Haiti cholera victims, Ban Ki-moon tells president World body invokes legal immunity to rebuff claims despite studies identifying UN peacekeepers as source of the outbreak

Click here for this in full @ The Guardian : http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/feb/21/un-haiti-cholera-victims-rejects-compensation


Haiti cholera
About 8,000 people have died from cholera in Haiti and thousands more have been made ill. Photograph: Thony Belizaire/AFP/Getty Images
The UN has taken the rare step of invoking its legal immunity to rebuff claims for compensation from 5,000 victims of the Haiti cholera epidemic, the worst outbreak of the disease in modern times and widely believed to have been caused by UN peacekeepers importing the infection into the country.
Citing a convention laid down in 1946, the UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, telephoned President Michel Martelly of Haiti to tell him that the UN was not willing to compensate any of the claimants. The epidemic has killed almost 8,000 people and stricken hundreds of thousands more – about one out of every 16 Haitians.

No comments: