This article combines health and water research results, evidence from confidential documents released under the Freedom of Information Act, legal analysis, and discussion of historical context to demonstrate that actions taken by the international community through the Inter-American Development Bank are directly related to a lack of access to clean water in Haiti. The article demonstrates that these actions constitute a clear violation of Haitians' right to water under both domestic and international law. The article exposes the United States governments role in blocking the disbursal of millions of dollars in international bank loans that would have had life-saving consequences for the Haitian people. The loans were derailed in 2001 by politically-motivated interventions on behalf of the US and other members of the international community in direct violation of the Inter-American Development Bank charter. To demonstrate the impact of these interventions, the article presents data gathered in a study that employed human rights and public health methodologies to assess the right to water in Haiti. The data reveal that Haitians experience obstacles concerning every aspect of the right to water: diffculties with water availability, limited physical and economic accessibility, and poor water quality. The article provides a framework of concrete duties and obligations that should be followed by all actors involved in Haiti in order to realize Haitians' human right to water. In response to the undeniable link between the international community's political interference and the intolerably poor state of potable water in Haiti, the article concludes with a recommendation that all actors in Haiti follow a rights-based approach to the development and implementation of water projects in Haiti. The full report of Wòch nan Soley: The Denial of the Right to Water in Haiti is available online at http://www.pih.org/inforesources/Reports/Hait_Report_FINAL.pdf.
The human rights movement is increasingly using interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary, mixed-methods, and quantitative factfinding. There has been too little analysis of these shifts. This article examines some of the opportunities and challenges of these methods, focusing on the investigation of socioeconomic human rights. By potentially expanding the amount and types of evidence available, factfinding's accuracy and persuasiveness can be strengthened, bolstering rights claims. However, such methods can also present significant challenges and may pose risks in individual cases and to the human rights movement generally. Interdisciplinary methods can be costly in human, financial, and technical resources; are sometimes challenging to implement; may divert limited resources from other work; can reify inequalities; may produce “expertise” that disempowers rightsholders; and could raise investigation standards to an infeasible or counterproductive level. This article includes lessons learned and questions to guide researchers and human rights advocates considering mixed-methods human rights factfinding. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Law and Social Science, Volume 17 is October 2021. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.
Human rights documentation around the world has shown that crises disproportionately or distinctly impacts women and girls, whether conflict or natural disaster-related. This is true for disease outbreaks as well. Human Rights Watch has raised the concerns about the gendered impacts of the Ebola virus outbreaks in West Africa, or the human rights dimensions of the Zika virus impacts in northeast Brazil. The COVID-19 pandemic and response are no different. We are already seeing the disproportionate and gendered ways government responses to the pandemic are generating harm to women and girls and reinforcing longstanding gender inequity.
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