Intelligence and law enforcement agencies, political parties, including the opposition, and non-state actors are key players in obstructing human rights activism in Bangladesh, according to a survey carried out by the Centre for Governance Studies.
The overall condition of the rights activism is ‘deeply disturbing’ currently, and is ‘worsening’ also, it said while launching the report titled ‘Challenges to Human Rights Defenders in Bangladesh’ in the city on Sunday.
The survey carried out between May 24 and June 25 on 50 human rights defenders in 36 districts identified judicial harassment and arrests, government repression, enforced disappearance, physical attacks, restriction on activities and threats of harms that exacerbated their activism.
Ali Riaz, a distinguished professor at Illinois State University, United States, prepared the report.
He found that more than one thing posed the situation in Bangladesh as ‘extremely unsafe’ for rights activism.
The survey found that hardly two per cent of the respondents described the situation as ‘safe’.
Almost a quarter of the defenders opined that the ruling party was a major source of hindrances while one-fifth laid blame on the law enforcement agencies, and more than one-tenth reported that intelligence agencies were the source of intimidation.
These sources, including the government officials, constitute 65 per cent of the responses, found the survey.
The respondents said that threats and intimidations adversely affected their daily activities and lives, and almost one-third of them reported scaling down their work.
‘The government must stop all forms of harassment of human rights organisations and human rights defenders using various state agencies,’ read the survey in its one of 12 recommendations to the government in order to improve the situation of human rights defenders.
The recommendations also include expression of the ‘political will’ explicitly by the government, upholding the promise to improve the human rights situation in the country and shunning of adversarial attitude towards the human rights defenders.
There are also recommendations that the government in consultation with the human rights organisations formulate laws to protect rights defenders based on the United Nations resolutions of 1998 and 2015.
It added that the Foreign Donations (Voluntary Activities) Regulation Act 2016 must be amended and vague terms such as ‘anti-state activities’ and ‘inimical’ or ‘derogatory’ comments about the constitution and constitutional institutions of Bangladesh should be deleted or clarified to stop using the law against human rights organisations and defenders.
‘Independence of the judiciary’ must be established, and its ‘impartiality’ should be ensured, the think tank pointed out.
Ain O Salish Kendra government body chairman ZI Khan Panna said that he did not think anyone had faith in the judiciary.
‘It is a country being run by the police, by the bureaucrats, not by the politicians. The politics is being run by a syndicate of businesses, or smugglers or black money holders. They can even purchase a judgement,’ he said, citing the example of arrest and bail of former Jubo League leader Ismail Hossain Chowdhury Samrat.
Supreme Court lawyer Sara Hossain shed light on judicial harassment in Bangladesh which warranted further research.
The human rights defenders face troubles and do not get legal remedy due to lack of legal protection, she said, adding that they were yet to get any legal protections from the court over enforced disappearance.
Sara was critical about the role of the NGO Affairs Bureau and said that it was set up to facilitate non-profit organisation to manage foreign grants in order to run charity work, essentially poverty alleviation and supporting human rights, but unfortunately, the availability of foreign grants was seen as negative activities.
National Human Rights Commission chairman Kamal Uddin Ahmed stated that the US sanctions on the Rapid Action Battalion had ‘geo-political’ purpose.
‘There is an image crisis for our country in outside world,’ he said, claiming that sometimes some people sent ‘concocted’ reports to top brass in the US and the EU suppressing facts.
Nurul Kabir, editor of New Age, contested the conventional narrative of the successive governments.
He said that the negative reports of the human rights defenders and lodging complaints with various international bodies by them ‘tarnish the image of the country’ and that ‘those who do this are unpatriotic and anti-state elements’.
The editor argued that when the state indulges in violating nationally and internationally recognised human rights of the citizens, it is rather the responsibility of the rights defenders to internationalise the issue on the grounds that ‘Bangladesh is a member of many an international body such as the United Nations’.
Observing that rights issues particularly of the people of authoritarian states cannot be resolved these days without simultaneously fighting them at the national and international levels, he called upon the rights defenders not to be worried of being called ‘unpatriotic elements’ by any authoritarian government for ‘that is rather a manifestation of patriotism of the rights defenders’.
Besides, referring to the claim by the NHRC chairman Kamal Uddin Ahmed, that the ‘government authorities mostly adhere to the commissions’ recommendations’, Nurul Kabir said, ‘if that so really happens, please tell the authorities concerned to stop extra-judicial murders, harassing political opponents and gaging on the freedom of expression of the citizens’.
Political and human rights officers from the US, the UK, Canada, the European Union, several embassies and high commissioners in the capital, civil society members, journalists, lawyers, human rights activists and academicians were present at the report launching event.