Haiti

A senior United Nations official and the Security Council today joined the international community in congratulating the next President of Haiti, whose election completes a repeatedly delayed process that took over a year.

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has apologised for the first time to the people of Haiti for the international organisation's role in a deadly cholera outbreak that has killed more than 9,300 people and infected more than 800,000.

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.