UN Secretary General papers in legal suit by Haiti cholera victims

Lawyers for the Haiti cholera victims, in a lawsuit against the United Nations have revealed that the organizations’ Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has been served with papers ordering him to appear in court.

The United Nations has been resisting lawsuits from the cholera victims who claim that UN peacekeepers caused the 2010 epidemic that is still ravaging the French-speaking Caribbean country.

According to Stanley N. Alpert, one of the lawyers representing more than 1,500 Haitians, who have filed a suit against Ban and the United Nations, “this is a significant development in the fight to hold the United Nations responsible and accountable for the tragic events in Haiti.”

The suit is seeking compensation, which could theoretically run into the billions of dollars.

However, Ban’s spokesman, Farhan Haq, denied that the Secretary General saw the papers which an unidentified person had tried to give him as he was walking towards the Asia Society on Manhattan’s East Side on Friday morning to deliver a speech. Haq said one of Ban’s security aides intervened and declined to accept them.

Cholera has killed more than 8,300 people in Haitian since it first appeared in the country.

Forensic studies, including one ordered by the United Nations, have identified the cholera bacteria as an Asian strain carried by Nepalese members of a United Nations peacekeeping force located in the country at the time. United Nations officials have described the epidemic as an enormous tragedy and have set up a fund to help but have continued to insist that the organization bears no legal responsibility for causing the epidemic.