Tribunereview.com

Six years later, the Haiti cholera epidemic that killed more than 9,000 people is revisited in a new report that calls the United Nations’ refusal to accept responsibility a “disgrace.”

The world body’s special rapporteur on poverty and human rights minces no words in blasting the U.N.’s ineffectual response as “morally unconscionable, legally indefensible and politically self-defeating.” Since the 2010 cholera outbreak in the wake of a major earthquake in Haiti, the scientific consensus (apart from the U.N.’s panel of hand-picked experts) has directly linked the contamination to U.N. peacekeepers from Nepal, who dumped cholera-infected human waste into Haiti’s Artibonite River in flagrant ignorance of commonsense sanitation, Fox News reports.

Cholera had been nonexistent in Haiti before the outbreak. Most recently, cholera flared up again after Hurricane Matthew in October.

The scathing report by Philip Alston, a law professor, also cites the Obama administration, which has backed the U.N.’s no-fault position.

The U.N. has announced a still-unfunded $400 million trust fund to provide “material assistance” for cholera victims and to improve Haiti’s water and sanitation resources, which Mr. Alston’s report calls “critically incomplete.”

Without any acceptance of responsibility, this blot on the U.N. is not easily wiped away. More importantly, as Alston said, “If the United Nations bluntly refuses to hold itself accountable for human rights violations, it makes a mockery of its efforts to hold governments and others to account.”