Law Book Review
How to monitor human rights violations?
Md. Robayt Khondoker
The hand book on 'Monitoring Human Rights Violations' is a first of its kind in Bangladesh which provides an easy and simple understanding of what constitutes human rights and monitoring the human rights violations. What makes the book particularly valuable is that the contribution is elaborately discussed about the methodologies of investigation, procedures and documentation and the systematic reporting to the national and international bodies. The author tried to provide an up-to-date, concise and readable book on monitoring human rights violations.
Basically, we find a detail presentation of the international human rights standard and the effectiveness of the various mechanisms and frameworks, their differing legal and political characteristics and contexts and their interrelationship. After reading this book, the reader will be able to explain the key purpose and features of the international human rights system. Each part of the handbook gives a glimpse into the diverse range of ideas encompassing contemporary human rights issues.
This book has essentially a descriptive character. The work is divided into two parts. In the first part of the book, it focuses on fact-finding, documentation and reporting. In this part, it discusses about the importance of human rights information, way of building the context, how to collect information, recording and analyzing the information and report writing. Normally in monitoring human rights violations, interviews are taken from victims, witnesses and from different sources to get information. In this section, the reader will get a complete guide on taking interviews. This part has concluded by showing how to use the information for the promotion and protection of rights with some meaningful examples.
And the second part discusses the normative content of rights and corresponding state obligations with illustrative examples. The reader will find the state obligations to take appropriate and effective measures to overcome any violence.
By drawing on human rights violation experiences in Bangladesh, the book brought some examples which illustrate how information obtained through fact finding helps to bring cases of rights violation before the notice of the court and the state response to it.
The reader will find a comparative picture of international human rights standard and Bangladesh constitution. The book also discussed about the role of various civil society organizations in the process of litigation in different cases. The various examples showed in this book says how civil society groups have brought cases of human rights violations before the courts, the way in which courts have sought to give meaning to the rights guaranteed in the constitution and international human rights treaties, the nature of directions issued by the court to ensure that the state complies with its human rights obligations and the challenges involved in pushing for enforcement of such judgments.
Activating human rights monitoring issues is an enlightening collection of well thought through cases aimed at human rights activist working in the field, academics and students. Hameeda Hossain, the prominent human rights activist in Bangladesh, in writing the foreword of the book has rightly pointed out that “human rights defenders, both individuals, such as press correspondents or lawyers, or institutions, such as legal aid and human rights organizations will find the guidelines provided in this manual very useful for their hands on work in protecting survivors and identifying perpetrators. At the same time the documentation should alert the state to its responsibilities”.
Due to the scope of issues tackled in this volume and the brevity with which they are tackled, it is likely that the reader will find the roles, functions and responsibilities of various actors, organizations and institutions in international human rights law. But it would have been better if the book could add a concluding chapter by summarizing all the issues discussed in this book and by including more cases from the other countries from South Asia relevant for us. I hope the publisher will soon translate it in Bengali language to communicate with the wider audience in the grass root level.
Finally I would like to thank Center for Human Rights Studies (CHRS) and Asian Institute for Human Rights (AIHR) for publishing such a wonderful handbook which definitely comes as a valuable resource in our hand. This book fills a long felt desire for the human rights activist to investigate and document the violations of human rights in our country.
The Writer is a Freelancer.
