UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk appeared before the Human Rights Council in Geneva in April 2025 to present findings from the UN’s latest report on Haiti, delivering one of the most urgent calls for international action on the crisis that any senior UN official had made. “If we wait much longer, there could be precious little left of Haiti to save,” said William O’Neill, the High Commissioner’s Designated Expert on Haiti, echoing the growing alarm within the UN system about the trajectory of events.
The report presented to the council documented the scale of human rights violations in extraordinary terms: 4,239 killings and 1,356 injuries documented between July 2024 and February 2025 alone. More than one million people displaced. One in two Haitians facing acute food insecurity. Two million experiencing emergency hunger levels. Nearly 6,000 displaced people in famine-like conditions. And a massive Cité Soleil massacre in which 207 people were executed over five days.
Türk appealed directly to the council and to the world, including the media, to put the spotlight on Haiti’s crisis “so that the intolerable suffering and destruction may end.” He emphasized that despite everything, the Haitian people “continue to hope and resist,” and that in areas where the MSS mission had been deployed, schools and clinics had been able to reopen — evidence that security improvement produced real humanitarian benefits.
The April 2025 Human Rights Council session was one of the most significant international forums for Haiti advocacy in years, generating coverage and political attention that advocates hoped would translate into the funding, deployments, and policy changes needed to match the urgency of the language being used to describe the crisis.