And on a more depress­ing note, the Times also has an arti­cle today on a new report (PDF) that describes how the U.S. gov­ern­ment blocked the dis­burse­ment of loans intended to fund clean-​water and san­i­ta­tion projects in Haiti for polit­i­cal reasons.

The rev­e­la­tion of the role the Amer­i­can gov­ern­ment played in keep­ing the loan money from reach­ing Haiti is the most dis­turb­ing part of the report–though given our his­tory in that coun­try it would be dif­fi­cult to describe the news as shock­ing–and I’ll get to it in a moment.

But the report’s real effort–and arguably its most impor­tant–is to con­strue this med­dling as a human rights vio­la­tion. Specif­i­cally, the report con­cludes that “it is clear that actions taken by the United States in block­ing IDB devel­op­ment loans ear­marked for water projects in Haiti were a direct vio­la­tion of the U.S. government’s human rights obligations.”

The key con­cep­tual hinge for this argu­ment, which seems fairly novel to me as a legal argu­ment (but what do I know?) is that

the human rights of indi­vid­u­als in many parts of the world—including the right to water—are directly affected by the actions that some States take at the inter­na­tional level through inter­na­tional orga­ni­za­tions, devel­op­ment pro­grams and, most impor­tantly for this report, IFIs [inter­na­tional finan­cial institutions]” (p. 50).

This opens the path to the report’s con­clu­sion that

the United States actively impeded the Hait­ian State’s abil­ity to ful­fill the Hait­ian people’s human right to water through its actions, thus breach­ing its duty to respect human rights. Such bla­tant frus­tra­tion of the object and pur­pose of the human rights treaties to which the United States is a sig­na­tory or a State party is a clear vio­la­tion of inter­na­tional law.

In any case, here are the para­graphs that describe the U.S. government’s inter­fer­ence with the Hait­ian loans, from pages 11 and 12 of the report, which was jointly authored by the Center for Human Rights and Global Jus­tice (CHRGJ), Part­ners In Health (PIH), the Robert F. Kennedy Memo­r­ial Center (RFK Center), and Zanmi Lasante:

In Decem­ber 2001, the Trea­sury Depart­ment cir­cu­lated the fol­low­ing lan­guage to its own staff and to that of the USED [United States Exec­u­tive Director’s Office of the Inter-​American Devel­op­ment Bank]:

In return for the for­ma­tion of a [Pro­vi­sional Elec­toral Coun­cil] formed on this basis, the [U.S.] Ambas­sador may tell Aris­tide that the U.S. would not oppose the grad­ual release of [the loans] pro­vided that the con­di­tions for their dis­burse­ment are sat­is­fied … the U.S. would adopt a help­ful pos­ture in the IDB on the release of some of the resources pend­ing in that insti­tu­tion. The Ambas­sador should stress that the U.S., how­ever, believes it is inap­pro­pri­ate for pend­ing resources to be released.

The IDB’s Arti­cles of Agree­ment explic­itly pro­hibit taking such polit­i­cal con­sid­er­a­tions into account:

[t]he Bank, its offi­cers and employ­ees shall not inter­fere in the polit­i­cal affairs of any member, nor shall they be influ­enced in their deci­sions by the polit­i­cal char­ac­ter of the member or mem­bers con­cerned. Only eco­nomic con­sid­er­a­tions shall be rel­e­vant to their deci­sions, and these con­sid­er­a­tions shall be weighted impar­tially in order to achieve the pur­pose and func­tions stated in Arti­cle I.

Instead of adher­ing to the Bank’s Arti­cles of Agreement—to which it had com­mit­ted itself to give “full force and effect” when it became a member—the U.S. gov­ern­ment demon­strated every inten­tion of using its power within the IDB to tie the release of the loans to its def­i­n­i­tion of polit­i­cal progress. It sub­se­quently began to explore avenues within the IDB to block the release of these loans.

Trea­sury Depart­ment offi­cials approached Bruce Juba, Spe­cial Coun­sel in the USED’s office, about the pos­si­bil­ity of block­ing the loans. Mr. Juba responded that because the four loans faced no legit­i­mate tech­ni­cal obsta­cles and had already been approved, the United States could not use its veto power in the FSO to block their disbursement.lxxx On this matter, he was unequiv­o­cal, stat­ing that: “The 4 loans approved by Par­lia­ment have NO obsta­cles to dis­burse­ment at this point,” and that, “THERE IS NO ‘VETO’ UNLESS CON­DI­TIONS PRECE­DENT HAVE NOT BEEN MET AND A BOARD WAIVER IS REQUIRED.” (empha­sis in original).

Met with this obsta­cle, Juba sug­gested a dif­fer­ent way of achiev­ing the same goal: the U.S. gov­ern­ment could, through var­i­ous means, “slow” the dis­burse­ment process….

The Trea­sury Depart­ment seized upon Juba’s sug­ges­tion and—to imple­ment this “slow­ing”
tactic—began draft­ing a letter for the USED’s Lawrence Har­ring­ton to send to IDB Pres­i­dent
Enrique Iglesias…. The true pur­pose of the letter was clear in Juba’s ref­er­ence to it
by email, when he wrote to Trea­sury Depart­ment staff saying, “I hope to get final OK to have Larry Har­ring­ton sign [the letter] tomor­row. While this is not a ‘bullet proof’ way to stop IDB dis­burse­ments, it cer­tainly will put a few more large rocks in the road.” (empha­sis added).

As this dis­cus­sion was taking place inter­nally within the U.S. gov­ern­ment, it was clear that
there was no valid reason to con­tinue with­hold­ing dis­burse­ment. The fact that the con­cerns being raised by the United States were irrel­e­vant was evi­dent in a pre­sen­ta­tion by IDB’s Coun­try Divi­sion Chief, Richard Archi, to IDB member States at a Haiti Infor­mal Donor’s Meet­ing at the World Bank on April 4, 2001. In his pre­sen­ta­tion, Archi con­firmed that: the loans were cur­rent, as they had been updated the pre­vi­ous year; the OAS posi­tion on the polit­i­cal sit­u­a­tion in Haiti was irrel­e­vant to the IDB’s dis­burse­ment process, con­trary to the impli­ca­tion made by the U.S. gov­ern­ment; and finally, that Haiti had only $800,000 of arrears at that time, which would not impact disbursement.