A joint statement by several international human rights organizations was issued ahead of The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michele Bachelet’s visit to Bangladesh from August 14-18, 2022. CHRD Bangladesh unequivocally supports this statement.
During the trip, High Commissioner Bachelet will meet with government officials and civil society organizations and visit the Rohingya refugee camps. In her time in Bangladesh, the High Commissioner should call for the immediate cessation of serious human rights violations such as torture, extrajudicial killings and enforced disappearances which have become commonplace in the country. Failure to condemn these atrocities could lead to the Awami League legitimizing such practices, rather than working towards serious reforms.
Hundreds of Bangladeshis have been forcibly disappeared, tortured and killed since the government led by Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina first took office in 2009. The security forces in Bangladesh have been committing grave human rights abuses for a long time under successive governments, including torture and extrajudicial executions but enforced disappearances in particular have become a human rights violation of choice of the Sheikh Hasina regime for more than a decade.
In December 2021, the United States Treasury Department imposed sanctions on the Bangladesh military’s notoriously abusive Rapid Action Battalion (RAB), but the government retaliated against victims’ relatives, human rights defenders and their families and human rights organizations.
High Commissioner Bachelet should strongly urge the government of Bangladesh to end these human rights violations immediately and to create an independent commission to investigate all the allegations of enforced disappearances, torture, extrajudicial killings and custodial deaths. The UN Human Rights Commission should support in every way in the formation and functioning of this commission to consult with the families of the victims and independent experts. The High Commissioner should make sure to convey to the government the message that ongoing security force abuses will jeopardize deployment of Bangladesh troops to UN peacekeeping operations.
High Commissioner Bachelet should also make it clear to the Bangladesh authorities that the continuous abuses by the government’s security forces and their crackdown on civil society poses serious risks for free and fair upcoming national elections in 2023. It should be made clear to the current government of Bangladesh that obstructing opposition parties in freely campaigning and that in arresting, disappearing and torturing members of the opposition as it had done in the 2018 elections must not be repeated.
*The Coalition for Human Rights & Democracy in Bangladesh (CHRD Bangladesh) is a US-based nonprofit organization.) www.chrdbangladesh.org
August 15, 2022
