Cholera hit Laurent Jacnel on a Sunday night last June. He was at home, in a Port-au-Prince tent camp for Haitians displaced by the February 2010 catastrophic earthquake, with abdominal pain so severe he refused the dinner his wife cooked and went straight to bed. By 6 a.m. the next morning he was being rushed to the hospital with acute vomiting and diarrhea. Jacnel, 23, a mason, recovered after eight days of treatment, but he says, "I haven't felt normal since. I became weak. There were heavy jobs I could do before, but now I'm not able to." His wife, a street merchant, struggles to bring in enough money to feed them and their young son.
So last week Jacnel trekked to a downtown legal office with a copy of his government ID in hand. He'd heard about a group of lawyers called the Bureau des Avocats Internationaux (BAI), who along with the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti are suing the United Nations for allegedly introducing cholera into Haiti in late 2010 â?? and are seeking $50,000 for each victim, double that for families of those who died from the illness. The suit represents one of the largest claims for damages ever brought against the U.N., leading victims like Jacnel to the door of BAI lawyers like Mario Joseph, one of the lead attorneys on the case, in droves. "We submitted 5,000 [claims] to the U.N." last month, says Joseph, "but we have close to 15,000 [total] by now."
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