digital emunction

No, not her. Real news today: the AP reported yesterday on the flooding that followed in the wake of Hurricane Gustav and Tropical Storm Hanna (click here to help):

GONAIVES, Haiti (AP) — Entering a flooded city on inflatable boats, U.N. peacekeepers found hundreds of hungry people stranded for two days on rooftops and upper floors Wednesday as the fetid carcasses of drowned farm animals bobbed in soupy floodwaters.

Haiti seems cursed this hurricane season, with its crops ruined and at least 126 people killed by three storms in less than three weeks. Even as Tropical Storm Hanna edged away to the north, forecasters warned that a fourth storm — Hurricane Ike — could hit the Western hemisphere’s poorest country as a major storm next week.

“If we keep going like this, the whole country is going to crash,” moaned Mario Marcelus, who was trying to reach his family in Gonaives but didn’t dare cross the floodwaters.

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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:

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