The image of a former Chief Justice, hands cuffed behind his back, clad in a bulletproof vest and helmet, being escorted to court is deeply unsettling. Yet it is no more disturbing than a Chief Justice fleeing his official residence in the wake of a popular uprising, seeking refuge in a military garrison, or being forcibly evicted by plainclothes security agents and exiled from his own country. Alarmingly, Bangladesh has witnessed all of these in the last eight years. It is a tragic chronicle of how the judiciary has been systematically dismantled by an all-too-powerful dictator—Sheikh Hasina. The repeal of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, which abolished the provision for a non-partisan caretaker government to oversee elections, stands as a pivotal moment in this erosion. It enabled Sheikh Hasina to conduct three consecutive one-sided elections and tighten her grip on power. While the Supreme Court had the jurisdiction to rule on the amendment, the conduct of then Chief J...

  Well-known civic rights activist Mizanur Rahman’s narration of his harrowing experience of being picked-up by police and tortured under custody, published in this newspaper’s online version on June 15, gives us some disturbing snapshots of unlawful actions of our law enforcement agencies. As a keen follower of developments related to human rights, I am reminded of the term used by the Committee on Torture (CAT) of the United nations for these kind of arbitrary and unlawful abductions by the members of law enforcing agencies. It's called “unacknowledged detentions.” Though Mizanur’s four-and-a-half hours-long unacknowledged detention came to an end to the relief of his family, the pains and psychological distress he suffered would no doubt stay with him forever.  Is this unacknowledged detention of Mizanur an exception or deviation in policing practices? Unfortunately, recent trends suggest it has become a preferred tactic to bypass the mandatory legal requirement of producin...

In an era when civil and political rights have been shrinking gradually, we have witnessed a welcome intervention by the Supreme Court. A 3-member bench of the High Court Division of the Supreme Court has said the practice of collection of call list/audio discussion from public/private phone companies without any formal requisition and formal seizure, and also without the knowledge of the subscriber must be stopped. Three justices of the bench, unanimously and without any ambiguity, have said the citizens’ right to privacy in correspondence and other means of communication is guaranteed under article 43 of the Constitution which cannot be easily violated at the whims of any interested quarter.   The judgement was the outcome of a death reference and two appeals one criminal and the other a jail appeal in a case of the killing of a seven-year old child. In the original criminal case, the prosecution significantly relied on the alleged suspects’ call lists and records, which wer...