On 7 January, Bangladesh’s prime minister, Sheikh Hasina, is set to claim re-election in what some observers have called “staged polling”, the opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) has termed a “dummy election” and   The Economist  has described as a “farce”. Desperate to avoid a genuine democratic exercise, Hasina’s government has preemptively removed its only real challenger from the field. More than twenty thousand BNP activists are behind bars, as are key BNP leaders, and the opposition party has decided to boycott the election rather than contest an unfair vote. The farce is best explained with the facts. For the 300 directly elected seats in Bangladesh’s parliament, the ruling Awami League has official nominees in 263 constituencies. In addition, it also has 269 party members standing as “independent” candidates, meaning there are two or sometimes even more Awami League candidates in many places – and that’s not counting the candidates of other parties allied to ...

Bangladesh has had two elections since the system of a non-partisan caretaker government overseeing elections was abolished. One was boycotted by most of the parties except the allies of the ruling Awami League, and the other was participated in by all the registered and unregistered parties. In reality, neither could be termed participatory, as voters were practically disenfranchised on both occasions. As we approach the third consecutive election to be held under the AL administration—which has so far been a restaging of 2014, due to the boycott by opposition parties—one question that worries everyone is: how will the world react? It is clear why Awami League is so desperate to make January 7, 2024 look like a genuine competition, without any real competitors. Allowing aspirants of ruling party tickets to run as independents against ruling party nominees has already resulted in numerous bloody, internecine conflicts. Discontent among the ruling party’s allies, too, makes the future o...

After exactly 4 years and 11 months, we saw with huge disappointment that the European Union has decided not to deploy a full-fledged election monitoring mission in Bangladesh for the coming parliamentary elections. It was  October 18, 2018,   that the then EU delegation chief in Dhaka communicated their decision to the then chief election commissioner K M Nurul Huda that they would not be sending an election observation mission. At that time the EU didn’t give any reason for its decision. It, however, said that they would send two experts with a mandate to work on the electoral process and submit their recommendations to the European Commission. Since then we have not heard anything about their visit, recommendations, and the purpose of such exercise. This time, the EU has explained the reasons behind its decision for refraining from election monitoring to the Election Commission. But there was no public announcement. According to EC Secretary Jahangir Alam, the EU decision h...

The message from Charles Whiteley, the European Union ambassador to Bangladesh, that the EU will not send election observers to the next parliamentary election if it is not participatory appears to be intended to encourage all political parties to make the next election inclusive. The EU ambassador communicated this message to the BNP, the main opposition, on Sunday when they met in Dhaka. Media reports suggest a similar message has been passed on to the government as well. Though participation or inclusiveness of an election is an important prerequisite, can it alone make elections credible or fair? Unfortunately, the 2018 experience proved otherwise.  If a participatory election means that the maximum number of political parties and independent candidates will take part in the race, then the 2018 national election was truly participatory. Even most other by-elections held afterwards, including the latest six by-polls to the parliamentary seats vacated by BNP MPs, were somehow par...

It's finally over. On Christmas Eve, when exhaustion from long haggling was about to set in, the British Prime Minister Boris Johnson declared, "We have taken back control of our laws and our destiny". His counterpart, the European Commission President, Ursula von der Leyen announced,  " It's time to leave Brexit behind". These two near simultaneous announcements came following a free-trade agreement that took almost a year to finalise. The deal makes Britain a third country like any other outside the European Union, but grants tariff and quota-free access to the USD 668 billion single market. But, claiming sovereignty has a cost and Britain had to agree to a mechanism, with arbitration and possible tariffs for violations that would keep its regulations and subsidies roughly in line with those of Brussels, to prevent unfair competition. The deal will require inspection of goods to prevent smuggling, especially of live animals. The deal also covers many cruci...

The European Union, barely three weeks before the general election in Myanmar, has held a bilateral dialogue on human rights with the regime seeking re-election. Following the dialogue a joint statement issued on October 14 by the EU and Myanmar noted that the EU reaffirmed its strong support for Myanmar’s democratic transition, notably in the context of Myanmar’s upcoming general election, as well as for its peace and reconciliation process and inclusive socio-economic development.  In the 393-word statement, however, not once did the term Rohingya appear, which describes   the distinct identity of the ethnic minority group that has been the subject of a prolonged persecution in Myanmar since the enactment of the Citizenship law in 1982 that stripped of their nationality. It is quite shocking as it ignores the fact that the International Court of Justice (ICJ) earlier this year in its interim order affirmed Rohingyas as a distinctive ethnic group of Myanmar and ordered tha...

  It is probably the first time that the House of Commons recorded a statement by a cabinet member that a legislation brought by the government of Great Britain will breach international law. In a new normal setting of the British parliament, where Covid-19 health rules imposed limits on the physical presence of MPs and ministers, the extent of the shock was beyond anyone ’ s guess. However, despite quite a significant dissent within the Treasury bench, Prime Minister Boris Johnson remains unmoved. Five predecessors, three from the Conservatives—John Major, David Cameron and Theresa May—and two Labour ex-PMs—Tony Blair and Gordon Brown—in unison decried the legislation, saying it would damage "trust" in the UK and its standing in the world.   The aim of the amendment is to change parts of the EU withdrawal agreement, negotiated last year. Northern Ireland Secretary Brandon Lewis on September 9 told the House that the new bill would break international law in a “ specific...

B angladesh has passed a remarkably calm period in politics both domestically and internationally considering that a year ago it held an election that was termed “tainted” by the European Union and many Western governments. The United States observed that the election-day irregularities “undermined faith in the electoral process.” The US House Foreign Affairs Committee also said it “lacked credibility”. At home the vote is popularly known, due to social media coinage, as “the midnight election”. This terminology derived from the fact that in many polling centres, the stuffing of ballot boxes was completed the night before the polling day on December 30th 2018. Although this was the second consecutive election where people were prevented from choosing their preferred representatives in a free and fair manner, the 2018 poll did not result in street protests. There was no repetition of the violent protests that followed the controversial 2014 elections which had been boycotted by al...