A decade after UN peacekeepers inadvertently introduced cholera into Haiti, causing an epidemic that killed at least 10,000 people and infected nearly a million, victims and their advocates continued in 2020 to push for the meaningful accountability and compensation that the United Nations had acknowledged was owed but not yet delivered. The cholera accountability campaign persisted despite the pandemic, the political crisis, and the decade of institutional resistance from the UN.
In 2016, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon had formally acknowledged the UN’s role in introducing cholera and promised a new approach that included material assistance for victims. A trust fund was established to receive contributions for this purpose. But by 2020, the fund had received a small fraction of the $400 million that advocates argued was needed, and the mechanism for actually reaching individual victims with compensation was still not operational.
Victim advocacy groups led by organizations including the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti continued their legal and political campaigns, pursuing cases in multiple jurisdictions and maintaining pressure on UN member states to fund the accountability mechanism. They argued that the failure to deliver on the 2016 commitment was a moral scandal and a practical statement about the UN’s willingness to be accountable for its own actions.
The cholera accountability campaign had broader implications for UN reform debates. If the world’s leading international institution could not be held accountable for causing a catastrophic epidemic, the advocates argued, the credibility of international institutions more broadly was at stake. The Haiti cholera case had become a test of whether the principle of institutional accountability could be made to mean something in practice.