50 Rights Defenders: 65 percent faced obstacles at work

At least 65 percent of the 50 grassroots human rights defenders, covered by a survey, faced obstructions in their work from the state and ruling party.

One in five had been harassed by law enforcement agencies, according to the report by the Centre for Governance Studies, which surveyed the rights defenders from 36 districts.

A quarter of them faced obstacles from the ruling party, while one in ten had been harassed by intelligence agencies, said the report "Who defends the defenders? The predicament of human rights activists in Bangladesh".

"Overwhelmingly, our respondents have described the situation in Bangladesh as unsafe," said the report, which was authored by Ali Riaz, a distinguished professor of political science at Illinois State University.

Riaz, who was the principal investigator for the report, shared the findings of the study at an event in Dhaka yesterday.

Some of the major harassment tactics include legal cases, death threats, physical attacks and intimidation of family members.

Three of the human rights defenders reported having been victims of enforced disappearance for their work, while 12 of them were physically assaulted. As many as 15 of the survey respondents faced government repression.

One in ten got slapped with frivolous cases just for judicial harassment. The cases were often under the Digital Security Act 2018.

About half of the survey respondents reported the harassment to the authorities, with the others staying quiet for lack of trust in the legal system or fear of retribution.

More than 40 percent of the survey respondents said the threats against them were not investigated either because of the state's involvement or for relations between perpetrators and the government.

Over one-third of the human rights organisations fail to protect their grassroots workers, the report said.

Subsequently, it called for the law governing non-governmental organisations and the foreign donations regulation act to be amended.

Vague terms such as "anti-state activities" and "inimical" or "derogatory" comments about the constitution and constitutional institutions should be deleted to prevent the abuse of the law.

Blocking access to foreign funds is often the chosen method of harassment by the government, the report said.

Whenever an organisation is seen as a "troublemaker", their permission for foreign funding is denied, said the human rights activists interviewed for the report.

The availability of foreign grants is being seen as a negative, said Sara Hossain, honorary executive director of the Bangladesh Legal Aid and Services Trust, a major legal aid provider, at the event.

"The NGO affairs bureau was set up to facilitate the process, make it easier to bring foreign funds. Now it has become a gatekeeper."

Extrajudicial threats make it impossible to seek legal redress, said Hossain, also a barrister in the Supreme Court of Bangladesh.

Nurul Kabir, editor of the English daily New Age, pointed out how human rights defenders face reprisal from the government for reporting issues to the UN and other international organisations.

"It is my democratic right to report to the UN because my state recognises our membership to the UN," he added.

ZI Khan Panna, chairman of Ain o Salish Kendra, a national legal aid and human rights organisation, and Kamal Uddin Ahmed, chairman of the National Human Rights Commission, a constitutionally mandated entity, also spoke.