Over 80,000 Haitians Still Homeless 5 Years After Massive Quake

More than 80,000 Haiti nationals are still living in more than 100 refugee camps five years after a 7.0-magnitude earthquake destroyed the country's capital Port-au-Prince, an international rights group said.

In a report titled "15 minutes to leave: Denial of the right to adequate housing in post-quake Haiti" released this month, Amnesty International reported that 22,741 households with 85,432 people are still living in makeshift displacement camps as of September 2014.

The U.K.-based group noted that 19 percent of them face a risk of forced eviction, noting that "majority of people who have left the camps have not benefitted from durable housing solutions, especially those who did not own land or a house before the earthquake."

"Although the number of people living in displacement camps remains large, it represents a decrease of more than 90 percent since July 2010. However, the numbers tell only part of the story," the report said.

The majority of people who were forcibly evicted were not offered an alternative location where they could resettle. This leaves them with no choice but to move to other camps or to settle in the informal settlement known as Canaan on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince, it added.

"Five years ago the eyes of the world were on Haiti after the devastating earthquake tore lives apart and left more than two million people homeless. Sadly, since then the world's interest has waned while tens of thousands of people remain destitute and homeless," researcher Chiara Liguori said, according to Sputnik.

However, the group clarified that mechanisms have been developed to provide some assistance retrospectively to forcibly evicted families, mainly through the allocation of rental subsidies only last year.

Meanwhile, several groups lamented that the figures show how donors, including the U.N., have failed the survivors of the impoverished country.

The Bureau des Avocats Internationaux in Haiti criticized the U.N. for failing to respond to a subsequent cholera epidemic, which the group said affected more than 720,000 Haitians and killed 8,700 others.

Mario Joseph said the cholera epidemic was an excellent sincerity test for the U.N., and the U.N. has flunked that test," said Joseph in a statement.

"Cholera is a man-made disaster that could have been easily avoided by minimally adequate sanitation at the U.N. bases, or stopped with 19th Century technology," Joseph said.

The ongoing Haiti cholera outbreak, which began in mid-October 2010 is considered as the worst cholera epidemic in recent history by the U..S Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

On Jan. 12, 2010, a 7.0-magnitude earthquake ripped through the heart of Haiti, the poorest country in the Americas, affecting three million people with estimated deaths of from 220,000 to 316,000.