Congo expels top U.N. official after report on police abuse

Source: Reuters World Service

By Aaron Ross; Writing by Emma Farge; Editing by Ken Wills

Kinshasa, 16 October 2014 - Democratic Republic of Congo on Thursday ordered the expulsion of the United Nations' top human rights official in the country, a day after the global body released a report accusing Congolese police of executions during a crackdown on gangs.

A spokesman from the interior ministry said the order to expel Scott Campbell, director of the United Nations Joint Human Rights Office (UNJHRO) in Congo, would take effect on Friday.

"The present report, under examination, was led in a partial and partisan manner, with the manifest intention of discrediting the PNC (Congolese National Police), of demoralising its agents and destabilising the institutions of the Republic," Congolese interior minister Richard Muyej said on Thursday, calling Campbell a "persona non grata".

The report, released on Wednesday by UNJHRO, said the Congolese National Police summarily executed at least nine men in the capital Kinshasa between November 2013 and February 2014.

Muyej, whom the report said ordered the crackdown called Operation Likofi, on Thursday dismissed its findings and said he had already addressed concerns about the operation several times, including before parliament in December 2013 and in a statement in April to the media and diplomatic corps.

Muyej said that the list of cases purportedly confirmed by the U.N. was "only a litany of presumptions presented in the conditional and resting on manifestly discredited claims".

He denied details in the report - among them that officers participating in the operation were masked and operated from jeeps - and added that the government planned a third phase of the anti-gang crackdown.