Thousands of Haitians killed or sickened by a cholera epidemic that they blame on UN peacekeepers cannot sue the global organization in a US court because the UN has legal immunity that only it can waive, a judge has ruled.
In a decision late on Friday last week, US District Court for the Southern District of New York Judge J. Paul Oetken dismissed a lawsuit in Manhattan filed by human rights lawyers seeking compensation for the cholera victims.
A lawyer for the plaintiffs said that they would appeal the ruling.
The outbreak has killed more than 8,600 people and infected more than 707,000 since October 2010, the UN said.
Oetken wrote that the UN’s ability to block lawsuits was established by a 1946 international convention and was made clear again in a 2010 ruling from a US appeals court in a case of alleged sex discrimination.
“The UN is immune from suit unless it expressly waives its immunity,” he wrote.
The UN did not expressly waive immunity for the Haitians and has not accepted responsibility for the outbreak, although it has tried to raise money for a cholera elimination campaign.
The plaintiffs plan to appeal Oetken’s ruling and show that their case is different from the 2010 case, said one of their lawyers, Brian Concannon, executive director of the Boston-based Institute for Justice & Democracy in Haiti.
“We are disappointed in the ruling, but not discouraged, and we have always assumed that this case was going to go to the appeals court,” Concannon said in a telephone interview on Saturday.
Concannon said that the UN was not entitled to immunity under the 1946 convention because it has failed to establish any kind of settlement process for cholera victims, as required by the same convention.
UN spokeswoman Vannina Maestracci said the organization welcomed the decision on Friday and was in the process of reviewing it further.
“Our focus in Haiti remains on our commitment to eliminating cholera in Haiti,” she said.
UN peacekeepers from Nepal likely caused the cholera outbreak when they were stationed near a major river and discharged raw sewage, according to the plaintiffs and a 2011 report from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Cholera, which had not been documented in Haiti for almost 100 years prior to the outbreak, is an infection that causes severe diarrhea that can lead to dehydration and death, and is caused by poor sanitation.
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