Jailed DRC ex-minister takes Ebola graft case to UN rights body

DR Congo’s former health minister, who was convicted of embezzling funds allocated to fighting a deadly Ebola outbreak, has referred his case to the UN Human Rights Council, his lawyers said Wednesday.

Oly Ilunga, health minister from 2016 until his resignation in July last year, was sentenced in March to five years in prison.

He was accused, along with a former finance minister, of embezzling $400,000 (340,000 euros) from the Ebola war chest.

Ilunga, 60, was denied a fair trail, lawyers Guy Kabeya and Bernard Maingain said in a statement.

He was also “prohibited, by a decision of a clerk of the court, from lodging an appeal”, they said.

Ilunga’s lawyers have rejected the embezzlement claim, saying accounts prove that public funds were used “exclusively” in the fight against the Ebola virus.

They have also rejected a police statement that the former minister was planning to leave the country to escape justice.

The Ebola epidemic, the country’s 10th since 1976, killed 2,200 people between August 2018 and June this year.

The outbreak was the second-worst in history after more than 11,000 people were killed in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia between 2014 and 2016.

Ilunga, who was a doctor in Brussels before joining the government, stepped down in July last year following a disagreement with President Felix Tshisekedi over the fight against the epidemic.

The president had stripped him of overall responsibility for tackling the outbreak and handed control to Jean-Jacques Muyembe, director of the DRC’s National Institute for Biomedical Research.

The DR Congo is currently battling a fresh Ebola outbreak which has seen some 120 cases and 50 deaths since June.