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 Advocates for Haitian victims of the deadly cholera epidemic that first afflicted their country three years ago said they were taking the extraordinary step on Wednesday of suing the United Nations, asserting that the organization’s peacekeeping force in Haiti was responsible for introducing the disease through sewage contamination from its barracks. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 The lawsuit, which the advocates said they would file in Federal District Court in Manhattan on Wednesday morning, will be the strongest action they have taken in pressing the United Nations to acknowledge at least some culpability for the outbreak of cholera, a highly contagious scourge spread through human feces that had been largely absent from Haiti for 100 years. 
 
 Cholera has killed more than 8,300 Haitians and sickened more than 650,000 in the earthquake-ravaged country, the poorest in the Western Hemisphere, since it first reappeared in October 2010. While the worst of the epidemic has eased, it still kills about 1,000 Haitians a year. 
 
 United Nations officials have said they are committed to eradicating the cholera, but they have not conceded that the organization was inadvertently responsible for causing it. They also have asserted diplomatic immunity from any negligence claims, a position that has deeply angered many Haitians who consider it a betrayal of United Nations principles. 
 
 Haitian leaders, while dependent on the United Nations to help maintain stability and provide other important services, have also expressed unhappiness over the cholera issue. In an address last Thursday at the annual United Nations General Assembly opening session, Haiti’s prime minister, Laurent Lamothe, spoke of what he called the “moral responsibility” of the United Nations in the outbreak, and said the efforts to combat it had been far from sufficient. 
 
 Forensic studies, including one ordered by the United Nations, have identified the culprit bacteria as an Asian strain imported to Haiti by Nepalese members of the United Nations peacekeeping force, known as the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti, which was first authorized in 2004 and maintains about 8,700 soldiers and police officers there, drawn from more than three dozen member states. The forensic studies have also linked the spread of the cholera to a flawed sanitation system at the Nepalese peacekeeper base, which contaminated a tributary that feeds Haiti’s largest river, used by Haitians for drinking and bathing. 
 
 Beatrice Lindstrom, a spokeswoman for the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti, the Boston-based rights group that prepared the lawsuit, said in a telephone interview that the listed plaintiffs were five cholera victims, who were seeking redress for themselves and all afflicted Haitians and their families. Ms. Lindstrom said the institute had decided to file the suit in New York because it is the site of United Nations headquarters and has an enormous Haitian expatriate population. 
 
 “We are asking for the judge to find the United Nations liable,” she said. “It has violated its legal obligations through reckless actions that brought cholera to Haiti.” The lawsuit did not specify the amount of compensation sought, which Ms. Lindstrom said would be “determined at trial.” 
 
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 It was far from clear that the lawsuit would be accepted by the court, which affords broad latitude to diplomatic protections for the United Nations against such litigation. These protections are partly rooted in the formal legal conventions created with the inception of the United Nations after World War II. “The majority view is that the U.N. and U.N. entities are immune from domestic lawsuits,” said Jordan J. Paust, a professor of international law at the Law Center of the University of Houston. 
 
 Eight months ago, Ban Ki-moon, the secretary general of the United Nations, informed Haitian leaders that it would not accept claims for compensation made by victims of the outbreak, citing a provision of the Convention on the Privileges and Immunities of the United Nations. 
 
 Ms. Lindstrom said the United Nations had also rebuffed her group’s attempts to address the issue. “They’ve refused to sit down for a conversation with the victims, or with us,” she said. 
 
 Navi Pillay, the top human rights official at the United Nations, suggested on Tuesday from her headquarters in Geneva that Haiti’s cholera victims were entitled to some compensation, although she did not specify who should provide it. 
 
 Farhan Haq, a spokesman for Mr. Ban, declined to comment on the lawsuit but asserted that the United Nations remained dedicated to helping Haiti overcome the epidemic. 
 
 “The United Nations is working on the ground with the government and people of Haiti both to provide immediate and practical assistance to those affected,” Mr. Haq said in a statement, “and to put in place better infrastructure and services for all.” ||||| A Haitian girl with cholera symptoms is doused with water at an improvised clinic run by Doctors Without Borders in Port-au-Prince November 20, 2010. 
 
 UNITED NATIONS Human rights lawyers filed a class-action lawsuit against the United Nations on Wednesday to seek compensation for Haitian victims of a cholera epidemic they blame on U.N. peacekeepers. 
 
 The decision to file the suit in New York comes after the United Nations said earlier this year that it would not pay hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation claimed by cholera victims in impoverished Haiti. 
 
 The cholera epidemic there has killed more than 8,300 people and sickened more than 650,000 since October 2010. 
 
 "Haiti today has the worst cholera epidemic in the world," said Miami attorney Ira Kurzban, who announced the lawsuit at a joint news conference with the human rights groups Bureau des Avocats Internationaux (BAI) and the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti (IJDH). 
 
 "Before these events, Haiti did not know of cholera for 100 years. Cholera was brought to Haiti by U.N. troops," Kurzban said. 
 
 The IJDH said the plaintiffs are asking the court to certify the case as a class action, which would allow the victims to represent and obtain relief for the hundreds of thousands Haitians and Haitian-Americans affected by the epidemic. 
 
 The lawyers filed the suit in the U.S. District Court in New York's Southern District, seeking $2.2 billion for the Haitian government to eradicate cholera along with unspecified damages for as many as 679,000 victims for personal injury, wrongful death, emotional distress, and loss of use of property and natural resources. 
 
 The lawsuit filed on behalf of Haitians and Haitian-Americans maintains that the cholera was introduced by U.N. troops brought to Haiti from Nepal, "a country in which cholera is endemic and where a surge in infections had just been reported." 
 
 The troops were stationed near a tributary of the Artibonite River and discharged raw sewage that carried a strain of cholera into Haiti, sparking the epidemic, the lawsuit said. 
 
 "The U.N. knew or should have known that its reckless sanitation and waste disposal practices posed a high risk of harm to the population, and that it consciously disregarded that risk, triggering an explosive epidemic," the civil rights groups said in a joint press release. 
 
 Asked to comment on the suit, U.N. spokesman Farhan Haq said: "We don't discuss claims brought against the U.N." 
 
 The United Nations was working on the ground in Haiti to provide assistance to those affected, he added. It was committed to do all it can do "to help the people of Haiti overcome the cholera epidemic," Haq said. 
 
 DIPLOMATIC IMMUNITY 
 
 U.N. human rights chief Navi Pillay said in Geneva on Tuesday that Haiti's cholera victims should be compensated, though she did not say who should compensate them. 
 
 "I still stand by the call ... of those who suffered as a result of that cholera be provided with compensation," she said. 
 
 An independent panel, appointed by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to study the epidemic, issued a 2011 report that did not determine conclusively how the cholera was introduced to Haiti. 
 
 However, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said evidence strongly suggested U.N. peacekeepers from Nepal were the source. 
 
 Cholera is an infection that causes severe diarrhea and can lead to dehydration and death. It occurs in places with poor sanitation. 
 
 In November 2011, the Boston-based IJDH filed a petition at U.N. headquarters in New York seeking a minimum of $100,000 for the families or next-of-kin of each person killed by cholera and at least $50,000 for each victim who suffered illness or injury from cholera. 
 
 Ban launched a $2.2 billion initiative in December 2012 to stamp out cholera over the next decade in Haiti. 
 
 Ban's spokesman Martin Nesirky said in February that the world body advised representatives of the cholera victims that "the claims are not receivable pursuant to Section 29 of the Convention on the Privileges and Immunities." 
 
 The IJDH said at the time it was disappointed by the U.N. decision and would pursue the case in court. 
 
 Under Section 29 the United Nations is required to make provisions for "appropriate modes of settlement" of private law disputes to which the world body is a party, or disputes involving a U.N. official who enjoys diplomatic immunity. 
 
 It was not immediately clear how the issue of diplomatic immunity for the United Nations would impact the lawsuit. 
 
 Kurzban said the lawsuit seeks to clean up the waterways and sanitation systems in Haiti. "Cholera is treatable, easily treatable, if the country has clean water and sanitation. 
 
 "We feel the U.N. has an obligation to clean up the mess that they made." 
 
 (Reporting by Louis Charbonneau; Additional reporting by Barbara Goldberg; Editing by Mike Collett-White, David Adams and Christopher Wilson)
– It's cholera in the time of litigation: Haitian victims of the disease are filing a lawsuit against the UN, claiming peacekeepers are responsible for the outbreak that has killed more than 8,300 and sickened some 650,000 there since 2010. The Boston-based Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti, which is preparing the lawsuit, already tried to get the UN to pay compensation to victims and their families in 2011, reports Reuters, but an independent UN panel at the time found the origin of the disease was inconclusive. However, other studies have linked the outbreak to UN peacekeepers from Nepal, suggesting they carried a distinct strain of the disease, which leaked into Haitian water supplies through a bad sanitation system, the New York Times reports. "We are asking for the judge to find the United Nations liable," says an IJDH spokeswomen. "It has violated its legal obligations through reckless actions that brought cholera to Haiti." The suit will be filed at a US District Court in New York today, though it's unclear whether the court will actually accept it—one legal expert tells the Times the UN is generally immune from domestic lawsuits.