Bangla Press Desk: Human Rights Watch (HRW) has hailed enforced disappearance charges as a step toward justice in Bangladesh.
Earlier, Bangladesh authorities filed charges against 28 people for enforced disappearances, secret detention, and torture, according to a report issued by the HRW.
Ousted Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina and former home minister Asaduzzaman Khan were among those charged, alongside several current and former army officers.
In a statement published yesterday, HRW said, back in 2017, then home minister Asaduzzaman Khan dismissed HRW’s report on secret detentions and enforced disappearances as a “smear campaign.”
When Asaduzzaman was reached by HRW representatives, he claimed most of those who had “disappeared” were criminals evading arrest, debt defaulters, or adulterers. Though he promised to investigate, no action followed.
During its time in office from 2009 to 2024, the Sheikh Hasina administration, of which Asaduzzaman was a key member, became increasingly authoritarian. HRW’s reports on extrajudicial killings, torture, and suppression of speech were met with denials or false promises.
The repression persisted until August 2024, when the Hasina government was toppled following three weeks of enraged protests in which 1,400 people were killed. Hasina, Asaduzzaman, and several senior officials fled the country.
An interim government, led by Nobel peace laureate Muhammad Yunus came in promising reforms. It established a Commission of Inquiry on Enforced Disappearances, which received at least 1,850 complaints, and found that over 300 victims were presumed killed in custody. The commission recently released a documentary “Unfolding the Truth” describing its findings, including horrifying accounts of cruelty.
Some of those present in court when the charges were announced were people whose cases HRW had previously documented. One was Mir Ahmad Bin Quasem, also known as Armaan, who days before his disappearance in 2016 had written to HRW expressing that he was "worried" about his safety. He was held for eight years at a secret military intelligence site before being released after Hasina's fall from power.
For years, his wife reached out to HRW in despair, mirroring the suffering of countless families of the disappeared left waiting for answers.
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