Choleric Notes on the Haiti Cholera Case

One may feel choleric about the posture consistently taken by the United Nations since evidence began to emerge in late 2010 linking the cholera outbreak in Haiti to negligent organic waste management and disposal at a base being used by the UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti, which was hosting troops from Nepal, a country endemically affected by the disease. That posture has been translated into stone-wall tactics, an absence of transparency and inexplicable silences, refusals to acknowledge responsibility for the deaths and infections despite overwhelming evidence, and most important for our purposes, indefensible legal argumentation purportedly ruling out any duty to provide redress to the victims on the part of the UN. The real bone of contention in the case at hand seems to involve the extent of the UN’s third-party liability for acts of a private law nature, as well as the repercussions, if any, of the non-fulfilment of that liability on the jurisdictional immunity of the Organization in domestic courts