AHRC slams cop bribing in Bangladesh
Asian Human Rights Commission in a statement has criticised the police force of Bangladesh for taking a huge amount of bribe from citizens.
“People pay more to the police than to their government”, headlined the statement of Hong Kong-based AHRC.
The rights body issued the statement Thursday on its website www.humanrights.asia.
It said policing in Bangladesh had become an industry of producing victims of torture and fabrication of criminal charges against civilians and political opponents since long.
The AHRC said the police had been serving as “hired thugs” during all regimes.
“To keep the police subservient to the ruling elite, the government has kept the salary of police force very low. This opens the floodgates and serves as incentive for police officers to demand and accept bribes,” it said.
The statement said in return for the impunity provided to the police force for their wrongdoings, the police do cleanup work most often dealing with political opponents for the ruling elite.
“People pay bribes to the police for registering general diary entries, prevent officer from torturing or ill-treating or including or excluding a person's name from the lists of accused or witnesses,” AHRC said, adding that people pay police for arresting a suspect while the same suspect pays the police to obtain a release from custody.
The statement said in cases of unnatural deaths, if a body was to be recovered and sent to a public hospital for an autopsy, the relatives have to bribe police for transporting the body.
“Unfortunately, the government is least bothered about this plight of the people,” said the AHRC.
It concluded by saying that the country must end this entrenched institutional wilt and treat the problem as the matter of highest priority. Unless Bangladesh reforms its policing system, there would be no hope for the people, it said.
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