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WHO action plan on preventing sexual abuse after DRC scandal





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The World Health Organization told AFP on Friday it was drawing up a plan to prevent sexual abuse and exploitation following a damning scandal implicating its workers in DR Congo.

The WHO has apologised to victims after a report on allegations of rape and sexual abuse by workers sent to fight Ebola in the Democratic Republic of Congo between 2018 and 2020.

Major WHO donor countries have publicly put the UN health agency under pressure on the issue.

WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus revealed details of the plan on Thursday.

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“The director-general presented the draft response plan to member states for their comment and feedback,” the WHO said in a statement to AFP.

“It will be a public document and will be published in the coming days.”

On September 28, an independent commission of inquiry released a devastating report which found that 21 WHO employees — among 83 alleged perpetrators of sexual abuse — had committed such abuses against dozens of people in the DR Congo during the Ebola epidemic.

The report found “clear structural failures” and “individual negligence” among the UN agency’s staff after dozens of women told investigators they were offered work in exchange for sex, or were victims of rape.

The allegations first came light after a year-long probe by the Thomson Reuters Foundation and The New Humanitarian.

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“The plan outlines immediate, medium- and longer-term actions to address the failures identified in the independent commission report,” the WHO statement said.

It focuses on putting victims and survivors at the heart of prevention and response actions, and “reforming WHO’s culture, structures, systems and capacity to create a culture in which there is no opportunity for sexual exploitation and abuse to happen, no impunity if it does, and no tolerance for inaction”, the statement said.

Tedros, who received the backing of most EU member states for a second term in office starting in August 2022, said he was “sorry” for what had happened, after the report was published.

The WHO is committed to implementing the report’s recommendations and to getting rid of the employees behind the abuse — as well as those who should have intervened.

Four employees have already had their contracts terminated, while two senior staff have been placed on administrative leave.

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