Two distinguished human rights activists who’ve tracked extrajudicial killings and disappearances in Bangladesh have been sentenced on Thursday to 2 years in jail, elevating alarm a couple of new escalation in quashing dissent.
The Dhaka Cyber Tribunal, a court docket within the capital metropolis, discovered Adilur Rahman Khan and ASM Nasiruddin Elan responsible of spreading misinformation underneath the nation’s data expertise act. The legislation grants wide-ranging powers of arrest and prosecution when coping with something the federal government finds defamatory.
It was the newest instance of a widespread marketing campaign by Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina to make use of the judiciary, amongst different establishments that she has largely captured in her 14 years on the helm, to harass and bathroom down dissenting voices as she companies her grip over the nation of 170 million forward of the subsequent election. The nation’s courtrooms are crowded with members of the opposition, activists and journalists enmeshed in an more and more Kafkaesque judicial system.
The case in opposition to Mr. Khan and Mr. Elan, leaders of the human rights group Odhikar, stems from a fact-finding report by their group a couple of brutal episode a decade in the past in Dhaka. The report, launched in 2013, discovered that the police had dedicated grave abuses in clearing a rally organized by a hard-line Islamist group.
The group, Hefazat-e-Islam Bangladesh, had introduced town to gridlock in May of that 12 months with a protest in opposition to feedback and cartoons it thought-about offensive to the Prophet Muhammad. In response, the police staged a late-night crackdown, reducing off electrical energy and unleashing violence. Opposition events alleged a demise toll within the lots of, whereas experiences in worldwide news media estimated between a dozen and 50 folks. Odhikar’s report stated it had discovered the names of 61 individuals who have been killed.
Soon after the report’s launch, Ms. Hasina’s authorities detained each the activists, holding Mr. Khan for 62 days and Mr. Elan for 25 days and calling their report distorted and defamatory underneath the nation’s data expertise legislation. Ms. Hasina’s officers maintained that nobody was killed in the course of the operation, and he or she advised the Parliament that members of Hefazat-e-Islam Bangladesh had faked deaths “by using red dye.”
In a joint letter, greater than 30 worldwide human rights organizations, together with Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, referred to as the conviction of the 2 activists “retaliation for their work documenting human rights violations in Bangladesh” and requested for his or her launch.
The organizations stated that whereas the federal government had waged a unbroken marketing campaign of harassment in opposition to the activists and Odhikar — together with blocking entry to funds and never renewing the group’s registration — the 2013 case was revived not too long ago after the United States imposed sanctions on officers of the Rapid Action Battalion, the elite paramilitary power that’s accused of many human rights abuses. Bangladesh officers have blamed experiences by human rights organizations similar to Odhikar for bringing about such sanctions.
“Human rights defenders should be allowed to conduct their necessary and important work without fear of harassment, intimidation and reprisals,” the joint letter stated. “Instead of prosecuting and punishing those who document and expose human rights violations, the Government should investigate and hold the perpetrators of these violations accountable.”
Source: www.nytimes.com