Report: Katrina Response Fails International Standards

The U.S. government's handling of evacuees before, during and after Hurricane Katrina fails to meet international principles for internally displaced persons, according to a new special report from the Institute for Southern Studies.

The report, "Hurricane Katrina and the Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement: A Global Human Rights Perspective on a National Disaster," says U.S. officials have failed repeatedly to meet the United Nations' Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement. Those principles, drawn up in 1998, spell out human rights protections for people displaced within their own nation by natural disasters and other events.

"To date, the United States government has not acknowledged the relevance of the U.N. Guiding Principles to those persons displaced within the U.S. by Hurricane Katrina," the report's authors, Chris Kromm and Sue Sturgis, write. "Yet ... the Guiding Principles are directly applicable to this devastating disaster. Before, during and after Hurricane Katrina, U.S. policy failed to adhere to basic provisions of the Guiding Principles."

More than 1 million people along the Gulf Coast were forced from their homes and communities when Hurricane Katrina made landfall near the Louisiana-Mississippi border on Aug. 29, 2005. More than two years later, tens of thousands of people have yet to return to their homes. The majority of them are from New Orleans, where levees failed after the storm hit, leaving much of the city underwater.

The Southern Studies report points to numerous ways in which the U.S. government's response fell short of the international standards for internally displaced persons, or IDPs:

Before the storm, the government didn't adequately prevent wide-scale displacements by properly protecting the region's coastline and building strong-enough levees;

In many cases, the government didn't do enough to prevent discrimination against some displaced people, in particular the poor, people of color, children, the elderly and the disabled;

U.S. officials didn't live up to international standards for humanitarian assistance, denied displaced persons access to help from foreign governments and failed to prevent abuses by private contractors;

Finally, the U.S. government continues to fall short of international standards by failing to help displaced persons return to their homes and not addressing ongoing needs for affordable housing, health care and employment.

"Hopefully, the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina will provide the impetus for the United States to bring its policies in line with international standards for protecting those displaced by disasters," the report's authors write. "By fully incorporating the Guiding Principles into all aspects of U.S. disaster law, the U.S. government can ensure those displaced in the future may be spared from suffering the same troubling fate as the victims of Hurricane Katrina."