US PROTESTS Beating of BANGLADESHI HUMAN RIGHTS ATTORNEY Rabindra Ghosh; RECOGNIZES PATTERN DENYING due process to Hindus
On October 16, 2020, human rights attorney Rabindra Ghosh and two colleagues were brutally attacked in the Paragram Police Station in Nabobgonj. They were in Nabobganj at the request of a local Hindu woman who has faced ongoing crimes from kidnapping and physical attacks to seizure of her home and attempts at forced conversion. Complicit in these crimes, police have refused to stop them. Thus after her son was abducted by police and beaten in their custody, she asked Ghosh for legal representation and to verify her allegations, which he did. Ghosh and the others then went to the local police station, having informed police earlier of their presence and that Ghosh had been retained as the victim’s counsel.
On arriving at the station at about 3:45PM, they noticed several men intermixed with police, armed with lathis: long, heavy bamboo sticks; favored weapons in police charges and in attacks on minorities. When Ghosh addressed the ranking officer present, the armed men attacked the attorneys, vandalized their vehicle: and seized their mobile phones, which had records of local and other contacts, personal, and professional data, placing everyone identified there in further danger. Later, Ghosh filed a First Information Report to start a case, but police refused to act on it.
This was not the first attack on Ghosh and likely not the last. From a BNP assault on him at a 2002 Bar Association meeting to a 2018 attack at the behest of an Awami League cabinet minister and the recent government complicit attack; Ghosh, his property, and even his aged mother have been subjected to violent attacks, some designed to be fatal, almost a dozen times. None were ever prosecuted by the government whose agents often were the attackers themselves.
In December, however, after action by Ghosh’s friend and colleague, Richard Benkin, and a letter to the US State Department, Senate, an Congress, signed by over three dozen human rights and religious freedom groups; the US protested the latest beating and lack of rule of law by Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s government. The US embassy also hosted Advocate Ghosh.
Attacks on human rights activists and lawyers in Bangladesh continue with impunity. Awami League control has not brought hoped for rule of law or an end to the ethnic cleansing of minorities. Sheikh Hasina refuses to allow any discussion of these matters, even according to members of her own party. Her critics and their families face violent reprisals. Human rights and religious freedom activists and attorneys are unable to operate, despite paper guarantees that exist only in their abrogation. The World Justice Project ranks Bangladesh 115 out of 128 countries in adherence to the rule of law, lower than Iran and Myanmar among others.
Without the global community demanding that Bangladesh take real action to guarantee human rights, the situation for minorities will continue to deteriorate. This is especially true for nations like the United States, whose markets for Bangladesh’s exports is critical to its economy. Failure to do so would give the Bangladeshi government license to proceed with its attack on religious freedom and its advocates.
31/3/21 Update: On 28 December, Advocate Ghosh was injured seriously when a truck slammed into his vehicle while he was on a mission. Healing continues to elude doctors at Pangu Hospital in Dhaka, so he was moved to All India Institute of Medical Science Hospital in Delhi, where he was operated on and started healing. He is now recovering with physiotherapy and other treatments in India. Keep him in your prayers.
US SENATE, HOUSE AND RELIGIOUS FREEDOM COMMISSION CALL OUT Bangladesh as major rights violator
Two important events this December signaled a new US approach to Bangladesh; and one that Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina and her minions need to take seriously. On December 9, The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) released its groundbreaking report on the enforcement of blasphemy laws around the world, and Bangladesh was featured prominently in it. For years, successive Bangladeshi governments have been able to get away with oppression of Hindus and other minorities by repeating the fiction that it is “a land of communal harmony.” Message to Sheikh Hasina: that subterfuge will not work anymore. The USCIRF report does not focus on the inherently undemocratic nature of such laws, its real impact is its identification of government culpability, which is where Bangladesh has been able to maintain the fiction that it is the nation envisioned in its constitution or by the Bangabandhu.
While USCIRF found 84 countries with blasphemy laws on the books, 81 percent of all cases where states enforced them came from only ten; and Bangladesh figured prominently among them, along with Pakistan, Iran, Russia, and others. Is that the company where we should find a country that calls itself democratic? According to USCIRF, the answer is no, as its report notes. “Governments’ enforcement of blasphemy laws undermines human rights, including freedom of religion or belief and freedom of expression.”
The study was particularly damning for Bangladesh because it took away its go-to excuses. The study (and my statement to a USCIRF hearing on the matter) noted that blasphemy laws come in various guises so countries like Bangladesh enforce blasphemy laws and the attack on free speech and thought they represent while calling them something else. The study also called out Bangladesh in particular for enabling hackers to make insulting comments, blame them on minorities, and then lead pogroms against those communities. And as with its decades-long program of ethnic cleansing, the Bangladeshi government turns a blind eye to these crimes, and if it makes any arrests, takes the minority victims into custody.
USCIRF was created by the 1998 International Religious Freedom Act to provide a source of verified information for the United States to use in formulating foreign policy; that is, the conclusions in its report are considered authoritative and will impact pertinent US actions, including funding and trade. Thus, only days after the study, the US House and Senate both passed resolutions calling for the global repeal of blasphemy laws in any guise. It passed unanimously in the Senate and received only three negative votes in the larger House. And like the USCIRF report, the resolutions identify Bangladesh as a major rights violator. In fact, Bangladesh and Pakistan are the only countries called out multiple times in the resolutions.
This is not to suggest that Bangladesh needs to listen to us as some sort of new British raj. But if Bangladesh wants continued access to US markets and its lucrative participation in UN peacekeeping, its leaders need to get with the rest of the free world before they find that they have caused untold economic hardship to their people.
The USCIRF study and my statement to the hearing are both available online; and I additionally offer my good offices and goodwill for the people of Bangladesh to help achieve justice for all its citizens, regardless of religion, thought, or speech.