UN-Accountable? A response to Devika Hovell

Devika Hovell has provided an excellent call to arms for academics to move beyond the question of whether the United Nations has due process deficiencies: By now we all know that it does. She invites us to focus instead on making “the normative case for adopting due process safeguards in UN decision making,” insisting that until now scholars have failed to ask the important theoretical questions underpinning their policy research.1 Hovell uses two case studies to demonstrate why resort to judicial mechanisms ought not to be the answer when seeking to find ways to ensure due process. She first focuses on targeted sanctions and then turns attention to cholera in Haiti. While I agree with the normative conclusions in this article, and agree that there ought to be greater focus on theory, in this short piece I shall make several points that demonstrate that the Haiti case study is more complex than Hovell’s account suggests