Burundi: WHO country representative and 3 experts declared Persona Non-Grata
The Briefing Issue #88, Wednesday, May 13, 2020
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Dear Regionweek Reader,
Burundi government is expelling four employees of the World Health Organization WHO including the organization’s country representative. These employees have been declared Persona Non-Grata and have until May 15th to leave Burundi.
The distrust between Burundi Government and WHO officials were highlighted an RFI report last month mentioning a pending decision to recall three senior WHO officials, including the representative in Burundi, Walter Kazadi.
It was reported that the World Health Organization in Burundi was kept out of samples and tests, unchecked sources on social media mentioned that the WHO team was ordered to leave the field.
The Burundian Ministry of Health did not want to react to the question of WHO representatives in Burundi.
Some commentators link the Burundi Government decision to the ramification of an exclusive investigation done in neighbor DRCongo by journalists Emmanuel Freudenthal and Joao Coelho on World Health Organization staff working on behalf of the response, accused of taking advantage of the system by increasing conflicts of interest and pressure on the teams responsible for combating the spread of the Ebola epidemic.
Technically the persona non grata doctrine does not apply to United Nations personnel. As described in the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, the doctrine applies to diplomatic agents who are accredited by one state to another, in the context of their bilateral relations.
The United Nations is not a state, and its personnel is not accredited to the states in which they are deployed, but work under the sole responsibility of the Secretary-General.
Founded in 1948, the World Health Organization (WHO), one of the most powerful UN agencies with more than 7,000 employees worldwide, recommends, with all its expertise, but remains dependent on the will of states. This does not prevent it from being regularly criticized.
After the 2009 H1N1 flu, which was less deadly than feared, WHO had been accused of having overreacted under pressure from pharmaceutical companies to declare the pandemic, which had caused the mass production of drugs.
WHO was later blamed, during the terrible Ebola epidemic in West Africa (2013), for failing to measure the scale of the crisis from the start.
A reform later, the UN agency can respond more quickly and effectively to epidemic outbreaks, as it is currently doing in the DRC, confronted since 2018 with an Ebola epidemic.
The arrival of the coronavirus in late December in China has raised criticism.
Thanks for reading
Fabrice Iranzi, RegionWeek.com
IN THE REGION
Comesa Covid-19 updates
Since the last COVID-19 situational update on 6th May 2020, 4,454 new cases have been recorded in the region. The highest numbers of new cases were reported in Egypt (with 2,545 new cases), Sudan (748), Somalia (254), and DR Congo (227).
The new cases recorded are related to the communal spread of the virus. Countries in the region have also intensified mass testing which has contributed to the confirmation of the new cases. The assumption is that the number of cases may be higher than the number of recorded cases.
As mass testing continues, it is expected that the number of confirmed cases in the region will rise and so will the number of recoveries. For instance, out of the 332 cases recorded in Mauritius, 322 have recovered and 10 deaths have been recorded.
This implies that Mauritius has no active case of COVID-19. Djibouti has also recorded a high number of recoveries (872) as compared to 1,227 total cases recorded. Other countries in the region that have recorded high numbers of recoveries vis a vis the total cases recorded include Tunisia, Seychelles, Malawi, and Libya.
Download COVID-19 in COMESA: Situational Update No. 13
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