What’s the purpose of a ‘rights cell’?

While we welcome the government's stated willingness to improve the state of human rights in Bangladesh, we are not sure whether setting up a "human rights cell" under the supervision of the foreign ministry director general (UN) would be the best initiative to this end. As per Foreign Secretary Masud Bin Momen, the purpose of this cell would be to better analyse the country's human rights situation and "rightly" present it before the international community, "especially those who work on human rights in Geneva and New York." So, is it for PR purposes, or is it to help improve our human rights situation?

We cannot miss the link between this sudden initiative and the US-imposed sanctions on some high-ranking officials of the Rapid Action Battalion (Rab) in December last year. For years, the media, civil society and rights bodies have cried out about the country's human rights violations, but nothing happened. Are we to believe that the government is now prioritising it of its own volition?

The UN Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances has been requesting the Bangladesh government since 2013 to invite it for a visit for an impartial investigation into such cases, but to no avail, as per the group's 2021 report. And while it has transmitted cases of enforced disappearance to the government since 1996—and is currently waiting for information about 76 such cases—the working group has only ever received clarification regarding one case in the last 25 years. Violations of human rights in the forms of enforced disappearances and extrajudicial killings are not uncommon in Bangladesh, and certainly must be investigated thoroughly in order to be eradicated completely.

To reduce the number of extrajudicial killings at the hands of security agencies, there must be a system of internal accountability preventing the members of police, Rab, CID, etc from committing such deeds. If the January 31 verdict on the Sinha murder case is anything to go by, the government must also investigate how many of the tens, or even hundreds, of annual "crossfire" incidents truly result from law enforcers being "provoked to retaliate." Most importantly, our own Human Rights Commission must be strengthened before we attempt to present a positive picture of our human rights scenario to the international community. We hope the government will commit itself in earnest to ending all human rights violations.