Geneva:
The head of the World Health Organization apologised Tuesday right after independent investigators probing allegations of sexual abuse in the DR Congo by the UN agency’s employees issued a damning indictment, citing “clear structural failures” and “individual negligence”.
“The first thing I want to say to the victims and survivors… I am sorry,” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told a news conference.
“It is my top priority that the perpetrators are not excused but held (to) account,” he added.
The abuses have been committed by personnel hired locally as properly as members of international teams in the nation to fight an Ebola outbreak from 2018 to 2020.
The commission interviewed dozens of ladies who have been presented work in exchange for sex, or who have been victims of rape.
At the very same news conference, the WHO’s Africa director Matshidiso Moeti mentioned: “As WHO leadership we apologise to these people, to the women and girls.”
The 35-web page report paints a grim image, noting “the scale of incidents of sexual exploitation and abuse in the response to the 10th Ebola outbreak, all of which contributed to the increased vulnerability of ‘alleged victims’ who were not provided with the necessary support and assistance required for such degrading experiences”.
The unique commission cited “individual negligence that may amount to professional misconduct” in the report, which Tedros mentioned “makes for harrowing reading”.
It also mentioned it discovered “clear structural failures and unpreparedness to manage the risks of incidents of sexual exploitation and abuse” in the central African nation.
And the investigators underscored a “perception of impunity of the institution’s staff on the part of alleged victims”.
Following media reports in May that WHO management knew of alleged instances in the DR Congo and did not act, 53 nations, like the United States, the 27 member states of the European Union, as properly as Britain and Japan, had jointly demanded that the WHO show “strong and exemplary leadership” on stopping sexual abuse.
A year-lengthy probe performed last September by the Thomson Reuters Foundation and The New Humanitarian had currently documented alleged exploitation and abuse of ladies by international employees through the 2018-20 Ebola crisis.
‘Completely unprepared’
The investigation discovered that more than 50 ladies had accused Ebola help workers — chiefly from the WHO but also from other UN agencies and top non-governmental organisations — of sexual exploitation, like propositioning them, forcing them to have sex in exchange for a job or terminating contracts when they refused.
To join the gruelling fight to roll back the Ebola epidemic, properly-paid help workers flooded into the poor area.
With more than 2,200 recorded deaths, the 10th epidemic is regarded the worst to hit the DR Congo because 1976, lasting from August 2018 to June 2020.
“Observations from the review team’s interviews with key officials… show that the organisation, focused primarily on eradicating the Ebola epidemic, was completely unprepared to deal with the risks/incidents of sexual exploitation and abuse,” Thursday’s report mentioned.
“It is therefore not surprising that it was totally unprepared for the scale of sexual exploitation and abuse incidents.”
The report says WHO leadership was conscious of sex abuse allegations a complete six weeks earlier than it initially claimed.
It quotes an e-mail to the WHO’s ethics point man Andreas Mlitzke regarding such allegations in the eastern province of North Kivu.
It mentioned the “message was sufficiently explicit and was in fact the first report of incidents of sexual exploitation and abuse involving WHO staff during the response to the 10th Ebola outbreak”.
The WHO “was aware of these incidents already in early May 2019 and not in mid-June 2019 as argued by Mlitzke,” it mentioned.
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