The UN responsibility for the cholera outbreak in Haiti 2016, para. 19
Paragraph- Paragraph text
- For the most part, the question of who bears responsibility for bringing cholera to Haiti has been systematically sidestepped in United Nations analyses. The first technique has been to take refuge in the passive voice, whereby readers are told that cholera "emerged", or "occurred", or "a severe outbreak of cholera was confirmed". In other words, it just happened, and no scientific or technical explanation is needed. Another technique has been to invoke the need to move beyond the past and focus instead on the future. The past is seen neither as a vital element in devising effective policies for the future, nor as a dimension that needs to be understood if non-repetition is to be promoted. A third approach has been to replace the term "responsibility" by "blame", and then to say that playing the "blame game" is unhelpful, distracting, unanswerable or divisive, and thus to be avoided. For example, although the panel was appointed precisely to "investigate and seek to determine the source" of the outbreak, the bottom line of their analysis was that identifying the source was "no longer relevant to controlling the outbreak". It was therefore time to look ahead and focus instead on preventive measures.
- Legal status
- Non-negotiated soft law
- Body
- Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights
- Document type
- Special Procedures' report
- Means of adoption
- N.A.
- Topic(s)
- Governance & Rule of Law
- Year
- 2016
- Paragraph type
- Other
- Paragraph number
- 19
sorted by
Date added
77 relationships, 77 entities