Six-Month Human Rights Monitoring Report - ODHIKAR

Under the  incumbent Awami League Government which has been in power since 2009, human rights violations continue unabated through suppressing political parties, particularly the opposition BNP and Jamaat-e-Islami and dissenting voices, including human rights organizations.

Human rights violations include  enforced disappearances, extrajudicial killings, torture and arbitrary arrests of leaders and activists of the BNP-led 20-Party Alliance.  The government is also harassing opposition party leaders and activists in various ways to create pressure on them, including implicating them in criminal cases or lodging false cases against them. Hindrances to freedom of expression and repression on the ordinary people and leaders and activists of the opposition political parties are also happening. 

ODHIKAR reports that the police forces are used to suppress dissent resulting to human rights violations affecting mostly the opposition. Bangladesh is not a yet a party to the International Treaty on the Protection of Persons against all Enforced Disappearances (ICCPED).  #YesToICCPED #ICCPED #Bangladesh #HumanRights #EnforcedDisappearance #ODHIKAR.   

A Tribute to Fr. Rudy Romano

You came to us as God’s precious gift
As a friend; a retreat master;
A co- rallyist during Marcos’ darkest years;
A good shepherd to the little ones of God’s flock;
A spiritual adviser and an ardent follower of Christ Jesus,
The Most Holy Redeemer....

Eliminate Torture, Strengthen Preventive Mechanisms to Prevent Torture

A Call for Solidarity on the International Torture Survivors’ Day

26 June 2017

"... Most of them lived the rest of their lives in the detention centers, hooded or blindfolded, forbidden to talk to one another, hungry, living in filth. The center of their lives - dominating the memories of those who survived - was torture. They were tortured, almost without exception, methodically, sadistically, sexually, with electric shocks and near-drownings, [some burried to their necks and left in the sun and the rain for days. They were] constantly beaten, in the most humiliating possible way, not to discover information - very few had any information to give - but just to break them spiritually as well as physically, and to give pleasure to their torturers."[Ronald Dworkin, in the introduction to "Nunca Mas, Argentina "]

CAPACITY BUILDING TRAINING

A two-day training session, mainly for the female relatives of Enforced Disappearance (ED) victims, was organised by Odhikar on the 19^th and 20^th of April, 2017 at the Caritas Development Institute Dhaka, Bangladesh. 17 relatives of the victims of ED participated in the training programme and amongst them 12 were women and five were men. As she was not able to keep her child somewhere else, one wife of a victim of ED brought her seven-year-old son to the programme as well. The training sessions were participatory, informative and also sensitive as some family members of victims were highly traumatised. The training sessions were conducted with the psychological conditions of the family members of the victims in mind.