Human Rights in Bangladesh 2004

Editor
Dr. Hameeda Hossain

Contents
Introduction
The Human Rights Image
Hameeda Hossain

Legal Developments
Sara Hossain and Muhammad Amirul Haq

Freedom From Torture and Ill Treatment
Ashraful Hadi

Arbitrary Arrests
Zaheed Hossain

Prison Conditions
Mohammed Tipu Sultan

Freedom of Information and Expression
Shaila Shahid

Freedom of Religion
Tapos Bandhu Das

Case of Ethnic Communities
Zobaida Nasreen Kona

Gender Inequality and Rights of Women
Bina D’Costa

Right to Education
Highlights from the Education Watch Report 2003/2004

Right to Shelter
CUS Bulletin and Advocacy unit

Social Security Challenges in the Manufacturing Sector: A Gender Perspective
Dr. Pratima Paul-Majumder

Justice for Children in Conflict with the Law
Shohana Shabnam

The Right to a Safe Environment
Dr. Mahbuba Nasreen

Rights of Persons with Disabilities
Dr. Nafeesur Rahman

Social Constructions of Masculinities and Kothi/MSM Framework
Shale Ahmed

Introduction

The Human Rights Image
Hameeda Hossain*

Human Rights Audits
In the last ten years, the annual reports on the human rights situation in Bangladesh published by Ain o Salish Kendra (ASK) have found a wide divergence between the state’s professed commitments to human rights and its practice. The record of human rights in 2004 presented in this volume illustrates a further downslide in state citizen relations.
Other audits by national and international organizations, including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Committee for Protection of Journalists (CPJ), and Transparency International (TI), have confirmed this trend. The first two organizations have noted a range of violations of civil and political rights and religious freedoms. They have also expressed concern with continuing threats to human rights’ defenders by the state and non-state actors. CPJ has commented upon the risky environment for journalists and curtailment of their right to free expression. TI’s Index has consistently identified a high perception of corruption in Bangladesh for the last five years. The link between these indicators with democracy and human rights becomes evident in the analyses offered in this volume.
The official response to such reports has generally been defensive, arguing that state security and economic growth are prerequisites for development. At times negative responses have attributed the reasons for such reports to motivated criticism by political opponents (often described as ‘intended to hurt the national image’). A denial mode has thus prevented a serious self examination of the fault lines in the system of governance and political culture. On the other hand, political opponents have used these reports as a whipping device to blame successive governments for their failures. Using human rights as a subject of confrontational debate between political opponents has prevented us as a society from deepening our understanding of why the political culture allows ballots to be followed by bullets, or why the social environment has tolerated grievous lapses in human rights.
There has been considerable debate on the importance of the interconnections between freedom, democracy and development. It has been generally recognized that a democratic system rests on the maintenance of a rule of law, on social and economic justice and on a meaningful participation by citizens in decision making and their implementation. Democracy cannot be served merely by satisfying the technicalities of voting procedures. If citizens remain passive or helpless to influence political behaviour, their democratic rights and fundamental freedoms are seriously jeopardized.
The chapters in this volume have mapped the political and cultural terrain that constrains the realization of human rights in Bangladesh. They also explore means used by citizens to press for exercise of civil and political liberties and to realize the opportunities for social and economic advancement.

Populist Power and Democracy
Bangladesh has taken pride in calling itself a ‘people’s republic’ and the three successive elections held since 1991 have been cited as evidence of democracy. While the country has indeed moved away from military rule, the system of governance and citizen state relations have been flawed by a political terrain in which a winner-takes-all control over resource distribution and politically motivated appointments have encouraged inefficiency and sycophancy. Short term populist concessions may appear to win support, but they do not contribute to long term peace, stability and cooperation. Instead of effective exercise of sovereignty by the people as promised in Article 7 of the Constitution, the system has come to represent the dominant interests of big business, bureaucracy, and military.
Winning elections in Bangladesh has become a means to consolidate and perpetuate power indiscriminately, to accumulate capital and acquire status. Since 2001, the ruling four party alliance, having gained almost the same number of votes as the opposition, has used its more than two thirds majority in Parliament to railroad some laws or to disregard a few of its own electoral pledges.
A permanent state of siege after elections has marked relations between ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ and political confrontation has frequently spilled over to the streets. The opposition has been sidelined in representative institutions and subjected to physical repression by bans on rallies and processions, arrest of party activists or implicating activists in false cases. On innumerable occasions, brute force by party cadres, in collusion and often with the active assistance of the police, has resulted in a suppression of public protests. Women participants in such protests have come under attack more than once.
Distribution of patronage to loyalists and engineering control over key institutions have fostered authoritarian tendencies and personalization of politics. Distribution of key jobs and businesses as favours rather than on the basis of merit has eroded quality and neutrality of performance through government service. Post-election, an overnight change of guard in educational institutions, administration, public media and regulatory bodies prepared the way for partisan manipulation of institutional structures. For example, in the universities, soon after the elections, vice-chancellors were replaced wholesale on the basis of party loyalty. A similar bias towards teachers and students has implied a drop in quality of teaching, just as their involvement in party or factional politics has detracted from their academic contribution. The immediate result was evident in gang warfare in educational campuses, where ruling party cadres succeeded in occupying residential halls, appropriating rooms for their supporters, ousting the opposition and obstructing normal student activities on campus. The end result will be a deterioration in educational standards and academic environment. Many professional associations have witnessed a similar partisan divide, which has affected the professionalism of their members. Equating the party with the state and equating an individual with a nation is not the way to build consensus or democracy - and this holds true whichever administration is in office. -
Representative institutions have not provided checks and balances on the executive as Parliament has remained largely dysfunctional with the absence of the main opposition party for the better part of its term, the speaker’s lack of impartiality, and absence of a quorum on many occasions (with exceptions including debates on members’ allowances and privileges). Monitoring by Standing Committees has been made largely ineffective by powerful ministers and secretaries, who have refused to comply with the Committee’s enquiries.
In this terrain, citizens have turned to the Courts for recognition of their rights. Many instances of public interest litigation have been considered by the Supreme Court for protection of a wide range of rights including the right to life, liberty, freedom from arbitrary detention, the right to equality, the right to freedom from forced eviction and the right to a healthy environment. Chapter One gives an overview of judicial activism to establish fundamental rights through institutional reform. On the other hand the effectiveness of the judicial system has been constrained by the prolonged delay in executing the constitutional provision for an independent judiciary. There has been dismay at the courts’ resort to archaic laws of contempt in cases of media reporting, which have been seen by many as curtailing the right to freedom of expression. The judiciary was also plunged into controversy as appointments to the High Court were made by the executive without effective and meaningful consultations with the Court.
The human rights movement has found allies in the progressive media. Press revelations of human rights violations, failures of governance at the national and local level, criminalized syndicates and violence against women, illustrated in Chapter Five have catalysed public resistance even in the face of threats and intimidation. While several newspapers were subjected to contempt charges or to executive harassment and district correspondents faced intimidation, the killing of four journalists and attacks on at least 197 reporters served to warn us that physical extinction could be the price of freedom of speech.

Lawless Law Enforcement
The major political parties have been unable to respond to people’s concern for security. Chapters Two, Three and Four record evidence of a diminishing respect for rule of law by the state and its inability to contend with organised violence and terrorism. On the other hand, a lawless form of law enforcement has heightened insecurity. The Rapid Action Battalion formed under an amendment to the Armed Police Battalions Ordinance 1979 has been given extra ordinary powers for internal security duties, exclusive intelligence into crimes and criminal activities, recovery of arms and ammunition, explosives and such other articles, and the apprehension of armed gangs and criminals. The government has taken no cognizance of the fact that RAB’s process of ‘cross fire killings’(i), in dealing with alleged law breakers has deliberately flouted due process of law. These arrests and extra judicial killings have not brought an end to crimes nor is peace and tranquility assured, rather their actions have in turn encouraged and apparently increased the rate of custodial deaths. Between April to December 212 persons were killed in the custody of law enforcement agencies: between June and December, when RAB started its operations, 68 victims allegedly died in ‘cross fire’ after they were taken into custody by RAB; during the year, 109 persons died in police custody and 103 prisoners died in jail custody. Amongst the men killed by RAB, twentyfour had no record of crimes, seven were allegedly members of the PBCP (the East Bengal Communist Party) an underground party, banned in Bangladesh.
Citizens have found their security further threatened by the inability of law enforcement agencies to deal with proclaimed and targeted acts of terrorism. Killings of journalists, political leaders, businessmen and a number of ordinary citizens have gone without proper investigations or trials. Since 1999, in at least 27 incidents, bombs or grenades were exploded in public places, leading to many casualties. Many of these incidents targeted events such as the celebration of the Bengali New Year, cultural events and two cinema halls. In each case some enquiry mechanism was set up but none of the reports were published. No trial meant that the identity of those responsible and reasons for the attack were never officially acknowledged. In 2004, bomb attacks at Hazrat Shah Jalal’s Shrine in Sylhet left the British High Commissioner injured. It brought the United Kingdom’s Scotland Yard to the scene of the crime, but with insufficient evidence provided by local intelligence agencies, the incident remained shrouded in darkness. A more devastating grenade attack on a huge Awami League meeting left 22 dead and hundreds seriously injured with splinters. The government appointed a one person judicial enquiry commission, but it lacked credibility from the start and its findings, of which only selective parts were revealed at a press briefing, named no names and gave no proof of its suspicions. The assassination, in January 2005, of Shah AMS Kibria a former finance minister, in a bomb attack in his home constituency, created a public stir across the nation, amidst allegations that investigations and trial procedures were deliberately slow and inefficient. Public campaigns, led by his wife and family have continued to demand a fair trial and impartial investigations into bomb attacks.

Religion, Militancy and State
Bangladesh has been cited by many as a ‘moderate, Muslim country’, in spite of the fact that at least 11.7 per cent of its population is non-Muslim (BBS, 1991, p. 30), and its governance is not run on religious principles. Its banking structure, its laws, its constitutional rights are not confined within religious boundaries. Even laws relating to rights within the family, while based on religious precepts, have undergone some reform. Yet, political rhetoric is laced with religious dogma, and subtle attempts have been made through the media, educational curricula and some policies to introduce a religious bias into state activities and to prioritise one religious group above others.
Tolerance of extremist politics has allowed vigilantism by fanatics such as Siddiqur Rahman (aka Bangla Bhai, an Afghan war returnee). His Jagrata Muslim Janata Bangladesh (JMJB) armed cadres have terrorized many villages across North Bengal. Investigations indicated that many of the JMJB cadres had been recruited from amongst returnees from Afghanistan, and some of them were linked to Islamist parties in Bangladesh. Between April to December 2004, newspaper reports estimated that 20 villagers had been killed or tortured by Bangla Bhai’s militant followers. While high government officials and political leaders in Dhaka initially denied evidence of the JMJB’s criminal violence in Rajshahi, Natore, Naogaon, there were allegations that local politicians and police officials were aware of their identity. The government’s ambivalent response and dilatory action has further fueled such terrorism. An order from the Prime Minister to arrest Bangla Bhai in April was not enforced. The Industries Minister, Maulana Motiur Rahman Nizami, the head of the Jamat i Islam (junior partner in the Coalition Government) went on record to state that Bangla Bhai was ‘a creation of the media’ (Janakantha, 23 June, 2004)(ii).

Religious and Ethnic Minorities
Protection of religious and ethnic minorities and non-discrimination is guaranteed by the Constitution. During the year, as before, a combination of majoritarian politics, perception of capturing electoral vote banks and economic greed has led to land grabbing and the denial of effective participation of members of minority communities in public service and political leadership.
Majoritarian politics has tended to exclude communities according to religion, class, caste, gender and ethnicity. The encouragement of populist, sectarian propaganda and policies may have brought immediate returns in the form of political support, but in the long run, this has served to generate social and political tensions and to encourage intolerance. The administration’s complicity was evident in police passivity in the face of threats to public peace, and in their refusal to register complaints by victims of violence or intimidation from. With foot soldiers recruited from amongst madrassah students, sectarian leaders have demanded state action against one sect, the Ahmadiyas. The government gave in to the extent of passing an order purporting to ban Ahmadiya publications. Allegations of discrimination against the Hindus and Christians in employment and other economic activities and charges of land grabbing have been ignored by law enforcement agencies. Chapters Six and Seven have shown how extremist political tactics have engineered threats to a pluralist society and heightened differences between communities.

Women’s Rights
Enforcement of women’s rights was examined by the UNCEDAW Committee in July 2004. It recommended that the government reform laws and policies, over the next five years, so as to promote equality and facilitate political participation. Chapter Eight reviews the existing pattern of discrimination against women. While women have taken many leaps forward in access to education and employment, their rights in many other areas, including within marriage are less than equal, partly due to these being prescribed by religious laws. Increasingly, widespread campaigning by women’s groups has raised the level of public concern with state violence against women political activists and politically motivated gang attacks particularly rape, as well as domestic violence. De facto impunity for perpetrators is a strong inhibiting factor for legal action. More recently concern was raised with recent changes in the National Policy for Advancement of Women (1997), that seemed to replace the focus on equality with complementary rights(iii).

Development and Social Change
Bangladesh can take credit for advances in many sectors: its rural infrastructure, education, maternal and infant mortality rates. Several indicators such as nutrition, education, fertility patterns show that Bangladesh may be getting ahead of at least two of the countries in South Asia. But such changes may be overshadowed by rising disparities in income and quality of life. In 2004, Bangladesh’s HDI ranking at 138 out of 177 countries in the UNDP report must stimulate us to examine the reasons for the lag (UNDP, p 219).
Poverty derogates from the totality of basic needs, quality of life and human dignity. Incomes may play an important part in improving the quality of life, but deprivation also results from lack of access to resources and opportunities. A skewed development has not favoured the poor. The Bangladesh Economic Review for 2000 and 2005 shows that,
“…the income share of the richest 5 per cent of the population increased from 18.55 per cent in 1991-92 to 23.62 per cent in 1995-96 to 30.66 per cent in 2000, while that of the poorest 5 per cent declined from 1.03 per cent (1991-92) to 0.88 percent (1995-96) to 0.67 per cent (2000). The disparity between these two segments of population increased from 1:18 (1991-92) to 1.27 (1995-96) to 1.46 per cent (2000). Income distribution has worsened significantly since 2000. Unemployment is rampant (about 40 per cent) and incomes of marginal and small farmers, agricultural labourers and of those employed in rural non-farm, often rudimentary type of activities, urban informal sectors, and lower level jobs in semi-organized sectors including the ready made garments industry (where a worker receives about Taka 1000 a month) are very low.” (Q.K. Ahmad)
These disparities are likely to have strong negative effects on access to social and economic rights.
Under donor pressures, the government has taken on plans for poverty alleviation and achieving Millennium Development Goals. These will be difficult to meet given the existing imbalances in power and profits. A more even development calls for a political economy that will be based on a recognition of social and economic rights.

Right to Quality Education
The Bangladesh Constitution has affirmed education, health, work, shelter and food security as fundamental principles of state policy, and therefore the state has an obligation to ensure these through policy interventions even though fundamental principles are not justiciable.
Compulsory primary education, incentives particularly for girls, schemes for non-formal education are among the measures taken to enforce the right to education. School numbers have also expanded. But, as Chapter Nine argues, quality learning has not been addressed. Standards vary sharply between the expensive private schools, urban and rural government schools and madrassah education. There has been a demand for introducing more uniformity in school curriculums and to reduce government subsidies to madrassah that do not conform with regulations of the Education Board.

Food Security
Over the years Bangladesh has become more or less self sufficient in food, but food insecurity has remained a reality for many. The hard core poor have very low nutrition levels not only because of inadequacy of diets but also their low buying power prevents them from coping with increased prices in the market. Consumption per day had fallen from 2244 (kcal) in 1995-96 to 2240 (kcal) in 2000, contributing to an increase in malnutrition levels from 10.3 (1995-96) to 11.5 (2000)(BBS, 2001, p. 2001). In the northern districts of Rangpur, Kurigram, Nilphamari and Dinajpur, during the lean season between October and November, known as Mora Kartik, the poorest sections of the population, including agricultural day labour and single female headed households, are faced with severe scarcity known locally as Monga. As demand for agricultural labour declines during this season, men migrate south to work as rickshaw pullers, or sell their labour in advance for meagre returns. There is an obvious drop in nutrition levels, as poor families, particularly single female headed households have hardly any savings to fall back on. This year, newspapers reported that approximately four million persons could be affected by the Monga in at least 13 districts (iv). It was alleged that the rations distributed under the Vulnerable Group Development Programme were not adequate to meet the demand. There were many complaints of inefficiency and leakage in public distribution, but government did not heed the recommendations to declare the concerned areas as disaster areas. Several professional assessments recommended strategies to prevent starvation and malnutrition in the northern districts of Bangladesh during the lean season. But the government did not take on supplemental programmes for resource distribution or employment guarantee schemes. The larger NGOs adopted some new strategies, but the outreach was too small to cope with the scale of the problem.

Right to Shelter
The National Housing Policy acknowledged the right to shelter, but this is not reflected in the Master Plan for Dhaka and other urban centres, as it has provided no space for housing the working poor. In fact most urban development schemes have demarcated land for the middle class upwards, to include professional groups and political leaders. Successive parliaments have voted for allocations of land for private housing for elected members. In more recent years, as land values have soared and there has been an increased demand for investment, property developers and construction companies have made enormous gains by acquiring land for development for housing the well-off. Governments have played an active role in evicting slums, to make land available for luxury development. Neither the government nor property developers have responded to the need for designing resettlement of slum dwellers. Chapter Eight details suggestions to implement the Millenium Development Goal for shelter. It also discusses directives enunciated by the Supreme Court on eviction and acquisition of slum lands as well as the difficulties of ensuring the implementation of these, and the need to develop more progressive policies and programmes to resettle and rehabilitate slum residents on a permanent basis.

Social Security for Workers
Despite relatively progressive labour laws, the rights of workers are rarely enforced given the high unemployment levels. With the privatization or closure of industries (including the closure of the Adamjee Jute Mills, which had been the largest in Asia, employing approximately 26,000 workers), loss of jobs has led to increasing deprivation and dislocation. Few industries have come up in the last few years, except in the export garment sector which has employed a work force of approximately two million, a majority being women. While it has not been possible to cover the conditions of work in all sectors, Chapter Eleven discusses workers’ rights and social security issues with a special analysis of the needs of women garment workers. It suggests a package of social security measures that need to be introduced for a productive work force.

Children under the Law
Chapter Twelve addresses the issue of children who come in conflict with the law, including relevant directions of the Supreme Court. It focuses on the role of the justice system in protecting children’s rights. Following a recommendation of the UN Child Rights’ Committee, the age that children are made liable for crimes has been amended from seven years (in an archaic law) to nine years but this is still alarmingly low and constitutes a violation of the Child Rights’ Convention. Notwithstanding the Court directives, children continue to face arbitrary arrest and imprisonment.

A Safe Environment
Global and regional plans for harnessing nature and for development have in various ways affected the safety of our environment. Despite important interventions to safeguard the environment, as Chapter Thirteen argues, the environment faces continued threats, of which one of the most severe in recent months was from the blow-outs caused by gas exploration by foreign companies. It also suggests that the government needs to take stronger measures to deal with the threats to bio-diversity, the prevalence of noise pollution and the lack of preventive measures for earthquakes.

Specially Excluded Groups
The rights of persons with disabilities and sexual minorities are barely recognized. There is now a legal framework to address the problems of persons with disabilities, but its implementation is less visible. Chapter Fourteen argues for an inclusion of their concerns in the mainstream development agenda,and to consider disability as an experience of oppression and difference. It also suggests that the Disability Welfare Act adopted in 2001 needs to go beyond a medical explanation to a wider social understanding of the causes and effects of disability. Sexual minorities are too afraid to surface and even raise their problems because of the social stigma and their criminalization under the law. Chapter Fifteen explores their insecurities and the reasons for their invisibility.

Pressing for the Practice of Human Rights
The government has often refused to give credence to human rights abuses on the plea that such references would tarnish the image of the country. But in maintaining this silence it has allowed impunity to perpetrators and encouraged criminal and militant tendencies. A major challenge for the human rights movement has been to press for institutional intervention and political reform. A broad range of tactics are needed to create a wider social consciousness for prevention of human rights, a supportive environment for promotion of rights and to ensure state responsibility for their realization. It calls for a widening of networks, for multi-layered interactions that would create public awareness as well as deter abuses.
Human rights defenders have tried to contend with the erosion of rights by both state and non-state actors through judicial activism, and to seek support from the media. Networks to deter violence against women have evolved holistic strategies to supplement legal aid with economic and psycho-social support. Civil society interventions to protect the environment, coalitions and forums for the rights of ethnic minority communities, have found wider resonance from human rights defenders. The concept of human rights is now becoming culturally more acceptable in the community, even though the imbalance of power makes it difficult to enforce these.
The Constitution, notwithstanding any regressive amendments, continues to guarantee fundamental rights to life and liberty. These have to be realized in the daily routine of citizens’ lives. Arguments in defense of cultural relativity cannot really excuse the loss of freedom of personal liberties or the marginalization of communities. Humanitarian concerns are not alien to our cultures, religions or to our historical traditions. Nor indeed is it plausible to argue that discipline and order are prerequisites for development, because it is the silencing of alternative voices or the passivity of citizens that has allowed for gross inequalities of power. An absence of respect for human rights is a warning of a demise of democracy and an unequal development.

Notes
* Founder member of Ain o Salish Kendra (ASK).

(i) This term has been used in most of the press releases issued by RAB to describe an incident of death of a person arrested on allegations of criminal activity, possession of arms or other illegal activities, who is transported in a RAB vehicle to a site where the arms are supposed to have been stored. The press release has reported that en route the arrested person is killed in a cross fire between his gang and the RAB team.

(ii) The government banned the Jagroto Muslim Janata Bangladesh (JMJB) and Jamaatul Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB) only on 23 February, 2005, and it was not until 12 September, 2005, that circulars were issued by Police Headquarters for arrest of the two militant leaders Siddiqur Rahman and Abdul Rahman.

(iii) In May 2004, a publication by the Ministry of Women and Children's Affairs showed the revisions in the Policy for the Advancement of Women's Rights (1997).

(iv) Sangbad , 30 October, 2005.

References
Ahmad, Q.K: “Inequality and Poverty in Bangladesh”, Daily Star, 22 October, 2005.
Rahman, M. ed: Human Rights and Empowerment , Dhaka, 2001.
Sen, A: Development as Freedom , New York, 1999.
Verma, J.S: The New Universe of Human Rights , New Delhi, 2004.