Health Law, Policy and Ethics Seminar Series
Presents:
D. Alissa Trotz
Professor, U of T Caribbean Studies and Director of U of T's Women and Gender Studies Institute
Brian Concannon
Founder and Executive Director of the Institute for Justice & Democracy in Haiti (IJDH)
Beatrice Lindstrom
Senior Clinical Instructor and Lecturer on Law, Harvard Law School
The United Nations and the 2010 Cholera Epidemic in Haiti: The Racial Politics of Institutional Disregard
Tuesday March 4, 2025
12:30pm - 2pm
Jackman Law Building, 78 Queens Park
Room: J125 and VIRTUAL
Join Zoom Meeting
https://zoom.us/j/99957887552?pwd=TavBkYTf5e9saU8T2EzIkJY6AeVmx1.1
Meeting ID: 999 5788 7552
Passcode: 620627
In 2010, the UN’s reckless disposal of human waste on a peacekeeping base in Haiti triggered the deadliest cholera epidemic of our time. For years, the UN denied responsibility through a response that one UN human rights expert called “morally unconscionable, legally indefensible and politically self-defeating,” and that Haitians denounced as a race-based double standard. As international institutions from the UN to the WHO now face existential threats and an erosion of public trust, this seminar steps back to examine how the world’s champions for global health and human rights lost the public trust needed to effectively advance their missions in Haiti, and what they have to do to win it back. The discussion will delve into the fight for justice waged by the Bureau des Avocats Internationaux (BAI) and the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti (IJDH), the politicization of global health justice, and the consequences for health and human rights when the UN sides with powerful countries against its own fundamental principles. This study, prepared by Kevin Edmonds, D. Alissa Trotz, Brian Concannon, Beatrice Lindstrom, Sasha Filippova and Kristina Fried, is one of a series of reports submitted for the O’Neill-Lancet Commission on Racism, Structural Discrimination, and Global Health.
Alissa Trotz's work is situated within a tradition of feminist political economy, and a Caribbean feminist tradition in particular, that takes an intersectional approach to social reproduction as a starting point and node of interrogation to think through histories and processes of dispossession and their contemporary manifestations. She is also affiliate faculty at the Dame Nita Barrow Institute of Gender and Development Studies at the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill, Barbados, and Distinguished Scholar at the P.J. Patterson Centre for Africa Caribbean Advocacy, University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica. She is currently a member of The O’Neill-Lancet Commission on Racism, Structural Discrimination and Global Health
Brian Concannon works as the executive director of the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti (IJDH), a U.S.-based NGO that creates pathways to justice and accountability for human rights violations in Haiti. IJDH works closely with its sister organization, the Bureau des Avocats Internationaux (BAI), as well as with Haitian grassroots groups and HaitianAmerican communities in the United States, to raise awareness of and obtain support for the fight for justice in Haiti. While BAI and other groups work from inside Haiti to reform its justice and political systems, IJDH brings the fight to the international arena, such as the United Nations, the United States, and other powerful countries where policy decisions can have a dramatic impact on the success or failure of Haiti’s struggle for democracy and justice.
Beatrice Lindstrom is a Senior Clinical Instructor and Lecturer on Law in the International Human Rights Clinic at Harvard Law School. Her work focuses on access to remedies for human rights violations, aid accountability, and Haiti. Prior to joining Harvard, Beatrice was Legal Director at the Institute for Justice & Democracy in Haiti. For nearly a decade, she led advocacy and litigation to hold the UN accountable for causing a devastating cholera epidemic in Haiti, including as lead counsel in Georges v. United Nations, a class action lawsuit on behalf of those injured by cholera. For her work on the cholera case, she received the Recent Graduate Award from the NYU Law Alumni Association and the Zanmi Ayiti Award from the Haiti Solidarity Network of the Northeast.
For further workshop information contact events.law@utoronto.ca
