March 2018 Issue: The Voice

Strengthening AFAD as it Completes its Second Decade of Struggle Towards a More Effective and Enduring Response to Disappearances in Asia

AFAD Commemorates the International Women’s Day, 2018

As the world celebrates the International Women’s Day, the Asian Federation Against Involuntary Disappearances (AFAD) pays tribute to all women who have been relentlessly struggling for truth and justice. AFAD remembers the women victims of enforced disappearance – those who have been forcibly disappeared as well as those whose lives have been gravely affected by the phenomenon of enforced disappearance even as they continue to fight bravely against it.

APDP’s STRUGGLE FOR JUSTICE AFFIRMS TRUTH BEHIND ENFORCED DISAPPEARANCES

Press Release

28 February 2018

For twenty-four years, the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons (APDP) and its individual members and volunteers have been campaigning against the phenomenon of enforced or involuntary disappearances in Jammu and Kashmir, wherein more than 8000 people have disappeared since 1989. The campaign has been to search and remember the disappeared, affirm the disappeared families’ right to know the truth, right to justice and reparations, and to demand that the government ratify and implement the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance.

Odhikar : Human Rights Monitoring Report - February 1 – 28, 2018

Executive Summary

The year 2018 is considered to be very significant year for Bangladesh as the 11th Parliamentary Election is likely to be held in December 2018. The Awami League led alliance government remains in power since 2009 and in the last 10 years, the government has made different, important government and independent institutions politicized and subservient to it. The Government unilaterally removed the Caretaker Government system in 2011, despite protests from the main opposition BNP, civil society and other political parties, without any referendum, through the 15th Amendment to the Constitution, which created a political crisis. Almost all political parties, including Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) (except Awami League and its alliance) boycotted elections in protest of the removal of the caretaker government system; and the Awami League reassumed power for a second term through controversial and farcical Parliamentary Elections1 on January 5, 2014 and in doing so lost credibility.