Anti-torture laws without real safeguards are not enough

Bangladesh does not suffer from a shortage of solemn words against torture. Article 35(5) of the constitution prohibits torture and cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment. The country has long been a party to the Convention against Torture, has enacted the Torture and Custodial Death (Prevention) Act 2013, acceded to the Optional Protocol to the Convention against Torture (OPCAT), and joined the Convention on Enforced Disappearance. The legal vocabulary is impressive. The institutional reality, however, is not. The state signing such treaties while leaving police stations, prisons, remand rooms, and intelligence cells effectively unmonitored has not defeated torture; it has only moved it from the text of law to the shadows of power.

The recent National Consultation on the Prevention of Torture and the Implementation held in Dhaka on April 25-26 should, therefore, be read less as a ceremonial event and more as an indictment of our unfinished statehood. The presence of UN Special Rapporteur Alice Jill Edwards in Dhaka underlined an uncomfortable truth: Bangladesh’s problem is not merely the occasional excess of individual officers. It is a system in which coercion has too often been treated as an investigative method, a disciplinary shortcut, a tool of political control, and a populist substitute for justice.

Torture persists because it serves bureaucratic convenience. When investigators are poorly trained, under-resourced, exposed to political pressure, and judged by confessions extracted rather than by evidence they uncover, violence becomes administratively rational. It is quicker to beat a statement out of a suspect than to reconstruct a crime from witnesses, forensic evidence, surveillance records, and lawful questioning. It is easier to frighten a family into silence than to defend a case in court. It is more convenient to call a custodial death an “accident”, “illness”, or “suicide” than to admit that the state has failed to protect the life and dignity of those in its custody.

This is why the 2013 Act, despite its moral force, has remained painfully underused. The first known conviction under the law in the Ishtiaque Hossain Jonny case was rightly celebrated. Still, the fact that this case was exceptional even after years of custodial torture allegations exposes the weakness of the surrounding architecture. A torture law within the same institutional culture it seeks to restrain cannot be expected to transform that culture. Without independent investigation, witness protection, medical documentation, judicial vigilance and protection against reprisals, the law risks becoming a monument to good intentions rather than an instrument of accountability.

OPCAT changes the question. It is not satisfied with punishment after abuse. It demands prevention. That means Bangladesh must establish a national preventive mechanism which will have the authority, resources and independence to enter all places where people are deprived of liberty, without prior notice and without fear of obstruction. Such places must include police stations, prisons, remand rooms, immigration detention, psychiatric institutions, juvenile facilities, and any informal spaces used by intelligence or security agencies. A preventive mechanism that cannot reach the most dangerous rooms will be nothing more than a public relations office.

Of course, the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) cannot perform this task unless it is rebuilt. Bangladesh’s continued B status in the GANHRI accreditation system is not a technical embarrassment; it is an indication that the commission has lacked the independence, appointment process, budgetary control, and investigative powers expected of a credible national institution. A commission that cannot independently investigate allegations against law enforcement agencies cannot meaningfully protect people from their abuse. The government should stop treating A status as an international image problem and start treating it as a domestic rule of law problem.

No reform will be credible if it avoids the legacy of special forces and political policing. Bangladesh has repeatedly learned that elite units created in the name of public security can become machinery for fear when command responsibility, transparent oversight and prosecutorial independence are absent. Rebranding an abusive institution is not reform. Dissolution without accountability is not reform either. The test is whether files are opened, commanders questioned, victims heard, evidence preserved, and perpetrators prosecuted through fair trials.

The same applies to crowd control. The bloodshed around the 2024 uprising and the allegations of excessive and indiscriminate force cannot be separated from the wider torture problem. A state that shoots, beats or arbitrarily detains protesters is not merely mishandling public order. It is sending a message about who owns the streets and who may be punished for dissent. Bangladesh must review the weapons, tactics and procurement doctrines of law enforcement agencies, including the use of lethal ammunition, metal pellets, excessive baton charges and other methods incompatible with necessity and proportionality.

A serious anti-torture agenda must also reform the investigation itself. The Méndez Principles offer a practical route away from coercive interrogation and towards rapport-based, evidence-based interviewing. This is not softness towards crime. It is professionalism. Torture produces false confessions, contaminates evidence, destroys public trust and allows real offenders to escape behind cases built on fear. Proper interviewing, forensic capacity, audio-visual recording of interrogation, prompt access to counsel, medical examination after arrest, notification to family and early judicial oversight are not luxuries; they are the infrastructure of justice.

Judges have a central role here. Every remand order should be treated as a site of constitutional responsibility, not a procedural formality. Courts must ask where the detainee was held, whether counsel was present, if there are injuries, whether the medical examination was independent, and whether any statement was obtained through coercion. Prosecutors must also refuse tainted evidence. Magistrates must not operate as clerks of custody. The judiciary cannot condemn torture in principle while allowing its products (coerced confessions and other tainted evidence) to be used in practice.

Enforced disappearance, custodial torture, extrajudicial killing, and false implication do not belong in separate moral categories. They are connected techniques of unaccountable power. A justice process that isolates them into disconnected files will miss the pattern. Survivors do not need another round of symbolic sympathy. They need disclosure, rehabilitation, compensation, prosecution and guarantees that the same agencies will not reinvent the same practices under new names.

Bangladesh now faces a stark choice. It can convert its treaty accessions into real institutional redesign, or it can continue the familiar cycle of speeches, committees, promises and denial. The first path requires political courage: disclosing detention spaces, empowering independent monitors, protecting complainants, prosecuting officials, reforming police law, changing interrogation culture and accepting scrutiny as a safeguard rather than an insult. The second path is easier, and it is precisely why torture survives.

The measure of democratic renewal is not whether the state can speak the language of human rights in conferences. It is whether a poor detainee, an opposition activist, a suspect in an ordinary criminal case, a prisoner, a protester, or a person with no influence at all can enter state custody and come out alive, unharmed and with dignity intact. Until that is secured, Bangladesh’s promise of reform will remain conditional, fragile and morally incomplete.

Justice Moyeenul Islam Chowdhury is a former judge of the High Court Division of the Supreme Court, who authored the landmark 16th Amendment judgment. He also served as chairman of the National Human Rights Commission and the Commission of Inquiry on Enforced Disappearances.

Views expressed in this article are the author's own. 

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