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The United Nations Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights in Geneva last week noted “with alarm” the small number of scientists from the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) who have been re-employed after German unification.

The issue had been brought to the attention of the committee by human rights organizations and trade unions in Germany. The committee was unconvinced by the official German denial that discrimination against state officials and others associated with the former communist regime had ever taken place. The committee has called on the German government to provide compensation, employment or pensions “as an act of national reconciliation”.

But German officials challenge the committee's conclusion that the scientists have been discriminated against politically. They argue that its statement claiming that most of those affected “may have been dismissed from their positions for political rather than for professional or economic reasons” is misleading.

Marion Bimmler, for example, head of the staff council at the Max Delbrück Centre for Molecular Medicine in Berlin, argues that “not more than 3 per cent” have been dismissed for political reasons, such as collaboration with the Stasi, the GDR's security service.

Nevertheless, only an estimated 15 per cent of the 24,000 scientists employed by the GDR's Academy of Sciences found permanent academic posts after the academy was dissolved in 1990. Each had to reapply for jobs in the new research institutes established along western lines, and many were unsuccessful in competition with candidates from west Germany and abroad (see Nature 370, 240; 1994).

Government-financed support programmes rescued some from immediate unemployment, but these finished in 1996.

Bimmler hopes that the government will provide more money to re-employ the scientists. She says that a new reintegration programme “would be much more helpful than sending competent people home with a pension”.