সংবাদ

Rights activists are alleging that police and a paramilitary force in Bangladesh are coercing families of the victims of enforced disappearances to issue statements that they deliberately misled police by hiding information about how their relatives went missing.

A 57-page report by Human Rights Watch in August last year said that “despite credible and consistent evidence that Bangladesh security forces routinely commit enforced disappearances, the ruling Awami League has ignored calls by donor governments, the U.N., human rights organizations, and civil society to address the culture of impunity.”

Rights activists have said the security agencies themselves are writing the statements and asking the families to sign them to make them look like voluntary statements from the families.

“According to the statements, the disappeared persons had gone into hiding on their own, and the families falsely reported them as cases of enforced disappearance,” Mohammad Ashrafuzzaman, liaison officer of the Asian Legal Resource Center in Hong Kong, told VOA on January 28.

“The police and RAB are coercing the victim families into signing the so-called statements in an attempt to exculpate the perpetrators,” he said, referring to Bangladesh’s paramilitary Rapid Action Battalion.

The recent police pressure on the families of the victims of enforced disappearance was triggered by the U.S. human rights-related sanctions on the RAB last month, Ashrafuzzaman added.