Bangladesh needs fundamental reforms, says NCP ahead of August 5 anniversary

The NCP, led by students, is a new political outfit that was formed a few months ago.

"We want the fundamental reforms. The constitutional institutions should be out of the control of the executives. In the last autocratic regime, what happened was that the Prime Minister was highly powerful. Everything was under her control. The Prime Minister was like a king. It should not be like this. We want democratic transformation. The Executive, Judiciary, and the Parliament - three pillars - should be independent," Tajnuva Jabeen, Joint Convener of NCP, told ANI

 The Human Rights Watch recently said the  interim Bangladesh government of Mohammed Yunus is falling short in implementing its challenging human rights agenda a year since tens of thousands of people took to the street to successfully depose their authoritarian government.

Some of the fear and repression that marked Sheikh Hasina’s Awami League Party’s 15-year rule, and abuses such as widespread enforced disappearances, appear to have ended. However, the interim government has used arbitrary detention to target perceived political opponents and has yet to deliver systemic reforms to protect human rights.

“The hope of the thousands who braved lethal violence a year ago when they opposed Sheikh Hasina’s abusive rule to build a rights-respecting democracy remains unfulfilled,” said Meenakshi Ganguly, deputy Asia director at Human Rights Watch. “The interim government appears stuck, juggling an unreformed security sector, sometimes violent religious hardliners, and political groups that seem more focused on extracting vengeance on Hasina’s supporters than protecting Bangladeshis’ rights.”

Eleven reform commissions established in 2024, as well as the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights and both Bangladeshi and international human rights activists, have submitted detailed recommendations to the interim government that are still pending.

Meanwhile, the government is facing enormous challenges including an alarming surge in mob violence, political violence, and harassment of journalists by political parties and other non-state groups, such as religious hardliners hostile to women’s rights and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people. On July 26 and 27, a mob damaged at least 14 homes belonging to members of the Hindu minority in Rangpur district., and there are continuing violations against minority communities in the Chittagong Hill Tracts.

Hasina fled Bangladesh on August 5, 2024, following five weeks of protests in which security forces killed 1,400 people, according to the UN. The interim government led by Yunus, a Nobel laureate, was established on August 8. But continuing torture and deaths in custody highlight the urgent need for security sector reform.

On July 16, violence involving security forces and supporters of Hasina’s now banned Awami League killed five people in the town of Gopalganj after the National Citizen Party, formed by students who had participated in last year’s popular movement, held a rally there.

In what appears to mirror the partisan actions of the past, police later arbitrarily detained hundreds of alleged Awami League supporters, and filed ten murder cases against over 8,400 mostly unnamed people. The government denied carrying out “mass arrests.”