Haiti cholera victims file suit against UN 

MORE than 1500 victims of a cholera outbreak in post-earthquake Haiti have filed a class-action lawsuit seeking to overturn the United Nations' immunity from liability for the epidemic that killed more than 9000 Haitians.

The suit, filed in a New York federal court on Tuesday, also is seeking compensation for the deaths and the 700,000 people made ill by the epidemic, and funding for sanitation and clean water in Haiti.
The lawsuit comes days after the US State Department asked a New York court to grant the UN immunity from legal action brought by another group of cholera victims.

UN spokesman Martin Nesirky did not respond to a request for comment. But on Monday, in response to a question about the US request to the court that the organisation's immunity be recognised, he said "it is standard practice for the organisation to assert its immunity in cases filed against it in national courts".
Last week, Emmanuel Coffy, a Haitian-American lawyer, also filed a separate lawsuit on behalf of three named-victims in a federal court.
The New York class-action suit is much larger in that it involves 1500 Haitian plaintiffs, including US relatives of people who died from the water-borne disease, says Evelyn Swiderski, a spokesperson for the lawyers involved in the suit.
Swiderski said the suit was filed by several prominent lawyers who were involved in high-profile national lawsuits over tobacco, the 2010 BP Gulf oil spill and the recent Goldman Sachs aluminium antitrust litigation.
Swiderski said the court documents include the UN's 2004 agreement with Haiti, which "explicitly waived sovereign immunity" when its forces were established in Haiti in 2004, and another document showing that the UN General Assembly "assumed its liability for damage caused by members of its forces in the performance of their duties".
"This express waiver of immunity by the United Nations was missed by the United States government in a letter it filed with the court on Friday in a separate lawsuit by the non-profit Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti (IJDH) over the cholera outbreak," Swiderski said.
Brian Concannon, director of IJDH, said all of the lawsuits as well as comments by UN Independent Expert on Human Rights Gustavo Gallon calling on the UN to take responsibility and compensate victims, letters from Haitian-American leaders and organisations and a recent amicus brief by South Florida Haitian activists "demonstrate the breadth of the movement demanding justice for Haiti's cholera victims".

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