Haiti

Businessman Jovenel Moise has won Haiti's presidential election in the first round, preliminary results show.

Welcoming the holding of elections in Haiti on 20 November, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon today stressed that the process “is crucial to ending the current governance vacuum” and urged all the parties involved “to show statesmanship at this critical time for the country.”

[…] Now, with barely two months left in his term, Mr. Ban’s administration is scrambling to compensate, for the first time, those who have suffered, with a plan to give them or their communities cash payments from a proposed $400 million cholera response package.

Accepting Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s recommendation, the Security Council today extended the mandate of the United Nations peacekeeping mission in Haiti for six months at the current force and police strength.

With Haiti facing the dual challenges of addressing the impact of Hurricane Matthew and restarting preparations for the holding of the much-anticipated elections, the United Nations envoy for the Caribbean country today expressed support for the recommended extension of the UN mission there by six months until mid-April 2017.

For the first time since a cholera epidemic believed to be imported by United Nations peacekeepers began killing thousands of Haitians nearly six years ago, the office of Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has acknowledged that the United Nations played a role in the initial outbreak and that a “significant new set of U.N. actions” will be needed to respond to the crisis.

Buoyed by the desire to get a democratically elected government in Haiti, diplomats at the Organization of American States on Wednesday said they welcomed interim Haitian President Jocelerme Privert’s executive order for the country’s 5.8 million voters to report to the polls on October 9 to vote on a new president.

The United Nations and its partners in Haiti have today expressed concern that as the provisional president's agreed 120-day mandate has come to end, “no measures have been taken to ensure institutional continuity” in the island nation, where several key deadlines regarding the political transition process have been missed.

“He is concerned that this situation has the potential to adversely affect international support to Haiti,” a statement issued by the Secretary-General’s spokesperson said. Mr. Ban also reiterated the need for a democratically elected leadership to take on the growing socio-economic and humanitarian challenges the country faces.