Last week, the U.N. announced that Haitian claims for compensation weren't receivable under article 29 of the Convention on the Privileges and Immunities of the United Nations. The Convention orders the U.N., which enjoys broad legal immunity in most national court systems, to create "provisions for the appropriate modes of settlement of disputes arising out of contracts or other disputes of a private law character to which the United Nations is a party." In a letter to Concannon, the U.N.'s Under-Secretary for Legal Affairs argued that "consideration" of the Haitian claims would "necessarily include a review of political and policy matters." In the U.N.'s opinion, peacekeepers from a cholera-endemic country dumping human waste into a major river system was a public policy rather than private law concern, meaning the U.N. wasn't required to create even an internal, para-legal structure to address Haitian damages.

Unmentioned in the letter is that in the context of the organization's privileged status under international and domestic law, this announcement was really a way of avoiding having to address any damages, ever. The U.N. has few legal obligations to anyone or anything other than itself, and it's not fighting the cholera allegations because it simply doesn't have to.

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The U.N.'s immunity within the American legal system is established through both the aforementioned 1946 Convention on Immunities and Privileges, which the U.S. signed in 1970, and through the 1945 International Organizations Immunity Act, which was partly aimed at convincing the nascent World Body to locate its headquarters in the United States. As Marco Simons, legal director of the environmental advocacy organization Earth Rights International explained, a diverse range of international organizations enjoy almost absolute legal immunity in the U.S. "The U.S. took a very blanket approach, rather than a case by case approach to the international organizations issue," Simons says of the IOIA. "Rather than passing a specific statute that implemented the immunity required for each international organization, the U.S. said that all international organizations were going to enjoy the same immunities as foreign states."

The IOIA has gone unchanged since the mid-40s. In that time, U.S. case precedent has established that a foreign government's immunity can be canceled in cases of commercial liability, violation of property rights, certain civil offenses committed within the United States and support for terrorism. But there are no such exceptions to the IOIA, or at least none that circuit-level federal courts can agree on: In 2010, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals determined that a New Jersey Company could sue the European Space Agency on the basis that the exact same suit would be permitted against foreign government. But the same year, the Second Circuit court found that a female U.N. employee could not sue the organization after she was repeatedly sexually harassed by Ruud Lubbers, the U.N.'s former High Commissioner for Refugees (the plaintiff sued for abuses committed while Lubbers was High Commissioner, between 2001 and 2005). In Simons's view, American law "probably goes beyond what the U.S. is required to do under the headquartering agreement or the U.N. charter."