WASHINGTON - The Robert F. Kennedy Memorial's past human rights laureates have mostly battled for political and civil rights, including fighting India's caste system and championing democracy in one-party China.

But today the organization will select Loune Viaud for her work on another human rights issue - access to health care.

Viaud, 36, director of strategic planning and operations at the Zanmi Lasante medical complex in Cange, Haiti, has helped the Cambridge-based Partners in Health provide free health care for hundreds of thousands of people in the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere.

The health care program recently received international attention for its success in providing combinations of antiretroviral medicines to a few hundred AIDS patients in a poor, isolated setting - a feat that could have large implications in fighting the disease globally. But that is just a small part of its work, which includes outreach clinics, specialized tuberculosis care, a women's clinic, and a center for children - basically creating an entire health infrastructure where none had existed.

''Loune Viaud's effort to combat HIV/AIDS represents human rights leadership at its most important level,'' said Lynn Walker Huntley, the executive vice president of the Southern Education Foundation and one of the five judges who chose Viaud for the RFK award. ''The right to live is the baseline. The lack of support for basic health care provision and other services to meet the ravages caused by the HIV/AIDS crisis is the cruelest violation possible of this fundamental right.''

Viaud, who will receive the award in a Capitol Hill ceremony featuring Senator Edward M. Kennedy and entertainer Harry Belafonte, spent part of yesterday outside the Inter-American Development Bank in Washington, holding a placard protesting the organization's delay in disbursing $146 million in loans to Haiti for health and education programs.

The loans, which were earmarked in 1997 and 1998, were initially held up because Haiti didn't have a parliament to ratify receipt of the money and later because of US protests over voting irregularities in Haiti's 2000 elections. Two months ago, the Bush administration stopped putting direct pressure on the government of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide to enforce democratic reform and instead signed a resolution that would free the loans as long as Haiti met several conditions.

A bank spokesman, Peter Bate, said yesterday that the low-interest loans were being withheld because Haiti was $45 million in arrears on past loans. A bank delegation plans to leave today for Haiti to discuss the terms further, Bate said.

Viaud said the bank has a ''moral obligation to get the funding out. We have way too many patients coming to our clinic. This money would go toward providing basic health care. It's unfair that people are not receiving medicines. Every day they are dying from preventable diseases.''

Jim Yong Kim, one of the founders of Partners for Health, which runs the Haiti medical complex, was one of several people from the organization joining Viaud at yesterday's protest. He said Viaud's selection signaled a greater awareness of a growing health movement for the poor.

''Loune is a grunt worker on the front lines, making sure the poorest people in the hemisphere get access to care,'' he said. ''I think their decision to give her this award is part of a turning point because it says that denying access to health care is a violation of human rights.''

© Copyright 2002 Globe Newspaper Company

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