The United Nations is facing a huge new lawsuit over the outbreak of cholera in Haiti that has widely been blamed on its peacekeepers, after 1,500 Haitian victims and their family members sued the international body in a federal court in Brooklyn in a class action.
The lawsuit filed in US District Court in New York's Eastern District also seeks to force the UN to bring sanitation and clean water to the Haitian communities in areas affected by the outbreak which started in October 2010.
An independent panel, appointed by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to study the epidemic that has killed more than 8,300 people and sickened more than 650,000, issued a report in 2011 that did not determine conclusively how the cholera was introduced to Haiti.
The UN has consistently refused to accept any role in the disaster, and has claimed immunity from legal actions such as the one just lodged in Brooklyn, and a similar class action filed on behalf of a sample group of five Haitians last year. Latest figures suggest that more than 9,000 people have died in the outbreak, which has spread from Haiti to Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Cuba and Puerto Rico, with a total of about 700,000 having been sickened.
The lawsuit asks the court to declare that the UN does not enjoy legal immunity from liability for the cholera outbreak, despite its humanitarian role in assisting Haiti.
A UN spokesman declined to comment on the lawsuit.
The United Nations said last year that it would not pay hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation claimed by cholera victims, citing immunity under a 1946 convention.
"Unfortunately, what the UN unleashed in Haiti was a devastating contagion," said Stanley Alpert, one of the attorneys for the plaintiffs, a former chief of Environmental Litigation for the US Attorney's office in New York.
"It was grossly negligent and utterly reckless to send in Nepalese peacekeepers and not test them for cholera," he added, noting that Haiti had been cholera-free for decades prior to the outbreak, while Nepal has a history of the disease.
The plaintiffs include several US residents, including Marie Laventure, who lives in Atlanta, and lost her father and stepmother to the cholera outbreak, the lawsuit states.
The UN created the 2004 "stabilization" mission in the wake of an armed rebellion that brought down the government and forced then President Jean-Bertrand Aristide to seek exile.
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