OP-ED by Abu Obaidha Arin
The World Health Organization has spent more than a year avoiding a simple question. What, exactly, is Saima Wazed accused of, and why has she never been given the chance to answer it?
Wazed did not walk into the office of the WHO Regional Director for South-East Asia. She was elected to it in November 2023, receiving eight of the ten votes cast by the region’s member states, a mandate confirmed afterward by WHO’s Executive Board under Article 52 of the WHO Constitution.
She took charge on Feb. 1, 2024, for a five-year term covering public health across nearly two billion people. That authority did not come from the WHO Director-General. It came from the governments of the region, through the only process WHO itself recognizes as legitimate.
On July 11, 2025, WHO placed her on leave, according to The Daily Star and Anadolu Agency, following corruption and abuse-of-power allegations referred by Bangladesh’s Anti-Corruption Commission. More than fourteen months later, she remains on leave. No charge against her has been proven. No investigation findings have been made public.
WHO has cited confidentiality and declined to discuss the substance of the case, as Health Policy Watch has reported. A woman who has not been found guilty of anything has now spent well over a year locked out of the office she was elected to run, reportedly without a clear written explanation, without a real opportunity to respond, and without being kept meaningfully informed as her own case moved forward.
That last part is the crux of it. Due process is not a technicality an institution gets to set aside because allegations happen to be politically convenient. It is the baseline standard any organization owes anyone it accuses of wrongdoing, and it is owed doubly to someone whose authority rests on an election rather than an appointment. An elected official’s office should not be hollowed out by attrition, through a process that never quite reaches a formal conclusion one way or the other.
There is also the matter of how the Director-General’s own office has conducted itself. By multiple accounts, it has engaged directly with Bangladesh’s Anti-Corruption Commission, the very body whose referral set this leave in motion, while giving Wazed herself none of the same transparency about her own case.
An international civil servant overseeing an inquiry into an elected regional director ought to be a neutral party, insulated from the domestic politics that produced the allegations in the first place. Treating an unproven referral from a politically charged domestic body as settled fact, while withholding from the accused the openness the organization demands of everyone else, is not neutrality. It looks like the opposite.
Then there is the reported push to line up her replacement. By several accounts, the Director-General has begun soliciting nominations for the SEARO directorship from other member states, as if the post were vacant. It is not. Wazed has not resigned, has not been terminated, and has not been found guilty of anything.
Leave is leave; it is not removal. If the Director-General believes the position should be declared open, the honest path is to say so formally, through the same regional process that elected her, and let member states decide for themselves.
Doing it quietly, while she remains on unpaid leave with an unresolved case still hanging over her, looks less like routine administration and more like an attempt to create a vacancy that WHO’s own rules do not currently allow him to declare.
Taken together, this is a hard pattern to explain away as ordinary institutional caution. Fourteen months of silence. A shift from paid to unpaid leave with no new finding cited to justify it. Direct engagement with the domestic body behind the allegations, paired with none of that same openness toward the woman those allegations target.
Quiet groundwork for a successor to a post that remains, officially, hers. If WHO had a proven case, none of this would be necessary. It could simply present the evidence, complete its own procedures and let the result stand on its own.
That it has not done so, after well over a year, says something on its own. It has the shape of a personal and political dispute being carried out through administrative channels, against a regional leader whose mandate the Director-General cannot control and, it would appear, would rather not have to answer to.
None of this requires concluding that Wazed is innocent of every allegation against her. That is not the argument. Nobody outside the process can reach that conclusion in either direction, because WHO has not let the process reach one.
What can be said is this: an elected regional director is entitled to know the case against her, to see the evidence, to respond to it and to receive a timely decision from an impartial process. She has been given none of that. Instead, she has been left in limbo, without pay, while the office she was elected to run is quietly staffed around her.
WHO routinely tells the world’s governments that public institutions must be transparent, accountable and bound by due process. It is long past time the organization held itself to that same standard. Saima Wazed needs what anyone facing an accusation is owed: a fair hearing, an honest timeline and an actual decision, rather than an indefinite silence that ends up functioning as a verdict of its own.
Abu Obaidha Arin is a Bangladeshi writer focused on politics, governance, and the societal impact of digital systems.
