Haiti and International Community Urged by Rights Groups to Promote Water as a Human Right

A groundbreaking new report will be jointly released on Monday, June 23rd, by NYU School of Law's Center for Human Rights and Global Justice, Partners In Health, RFK Memorial Center for Human Rights, and Zanmi Lasante. The report, "Woch nan Soley: the Denial of the Right to Water in Haiti" analyzes the devastating consequences of the failure of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) to disburse life-saving loans for water and sanitation improvements in Haiti. According to the report, in 1998, the IDB had approved $54 million dollars in loans that would have cut the cost of clean water by 90 percent, while also making drastic changes to water-providing infrastructure systems. The report shows that even though these loans were initially approved and would have provided Haiti's most impoverished communities consistent access to clean and safe water, they were blocked in 2001 by the United States and other complicit international actors, effectively shutting down the projects.

One of the report's innovations is that it employs both human rights and public health methodologies to assess the right to access water in Haiti, following extensive surveys of community water sources, meetings with community leaders, and a thorough analysis of Haiti's constitution as well as international legal obligations around the right to water. The resulting data reveals a shocking portrait of the lack of available clean water in Port-de-Paix, one of two Haitian cities where the first IDB-funded water projects were to be implemented. The report offers analysis and policy suggestions for international financial institutions, national governments, and other entities in order to protect and promote the full range of human rights impacted by resource-based development projects. The report is the first of its kind to lay out the full range of domestic and legal obligations around the right to water in Haiti.