Most recently, Bangladesh again found a place in global media headlines. Sadly, it was for convicting and imprisoning two of its most prominent human rights defenders, Adilur Rahman Khan and Nasiruddin Elan of Odhikar. This is the first awarding of jail term to any human rights defender in Bangladesh in since independence. Adilur founded  human rights organisation Odhikar in 1994. With an initial slow start, it soon became a leading independent rights monitoring group. Since then, it has been diligently documenting all kinds of violations of human rights by both state agencies, and non-state actors.   Odhikar’s annual reports on rights dating back to 2004 are still available on the organisation’s website. These reports contain well-sourced data about custodial deaths, crossfires, extrajudicial killings, detentions without trial, use of force to break up political and union protests, violences against minorities and women, border killings, and most other violations ...

When Bangladesh needs to prove that it has been listening to the concern about respecting human rights and uphold rule of law, it has done quite the opposite. The reactions coming from the United Nations’ human rights body, Office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights (OHCHR) and other international rights groups to the deregistration of Odhikar, a leading human rights organisation in Bangladesh, make it clear that no one believes this action is anything other than a punishment for the work it does. The refusal to renew Odhikar’s operating licence follows a letter sent to the OHCHR on May 12, in which the government accused the organisation of ‘disproportionate bias and prejudice against Bangladesh, in particular the ruling party Awami League’ and argued that the UN human rights mechanism should disqualify and shun it as a source of information.  The letter was written as an official response to a joint urgent appeal issued by the Working Group on Enforced Disappearances, the Wo...

After almost two years in office, something of real significance has been suggested by the chairman of the Bangladesh's National Human Rights Commission. In the backdrop of increasing incidents of disappearances, the worried NHRC chairman, Professor Mizanur Rahman has said that 'Disappearances have emerged as a new trick of torturing citizens'   (   HRC boss worried at 'disappearances'   ).  Statistics compiled by rights group, Odhikar (   odhikar .org   ) show that while the number of so-called cross-fire deaths has fallen from 101 in 2010 to 44 during January to August 2011, number of abductions reported during the same period has risen to two per month against 1.5 in the previous year.  Invariably, victims are either ending up dead or remained untraceable.  And, the most worrying thing is that security forces have consistently denied any role in those disappearances while family members of the victims have alleged that abd...