I survived enforced disappearance. Parliament has now weakened the safeguards

On September 6, I stood in the Jatiya Sangsad chamber with a strip of black cloth tied over my mouth and another over my ears. Around me stood my opposition colleagues, bound the same way. When the National Human Rights Commission Bill, 2026, and the Prevention of Enforced Disappearance Act, 2026, were put to a vote, we walked out. It was the only honest thing left to do. You do not lend your presence to the passage of a black law; you mark it in black, and you leave.

The black cloth was a mark of protest for us. A mouth bound shut is what enforced disappearance does to its victim; ears bound shut is what the state does to the victim’s family. For eight years, my mother knocked on countless doors in this country asking where her son was, and the state that had taken me looked past her as if she were not there. On September 6, parliament wrote that deafness into law.

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In my earlier column, I warned about what these bills contained and pleaded, while they were still amendable, for a cure of the defects. That plea failed. The bills passed almost unamended. So, this column is not a warning; it is a record, and a demand.

Let me state plainly what parliament has enacted. Under Section 20 of the new NHRC law, when a member of a security force is accused of an abuse, the commission may not investigate. It may only request a report from that force’s own command. It has no power of subpoena, no power to demand a document, no right to inspect a site. Under Section 14 of the enforced disappearance law, complaints of disappearance go to the ordinary police for investigation, even though the police are among the very institutions the law exists to hold to account. The fox has been appointed to guard the chicken coop, and the appointment has been made by statute.

I have tested these laws against the only standard I know intimately: my own case when I was taken from my home in front of my two little daughters. My family did not know which force had taken me. The men who came that night carried no warrant. Under the new law, a complaint must find its way to the command of the responsible force, or to a police officer expected to compel answers from agencies far above his reach. But how is a victim’s family to know which force to name?  Men in unmarked vehicles do not leave a visiting card. I ask the home minister directly: if, God forbid, someone from your own family were taken tonight, could you say which force had them? If the home minister himself could not, on what basis does this law expect a farmer’s wife or a student’s father to do so? A law that requires the victim to identify the perpetrators before the state will investigate the crime is not a law against disappearance. It is an enabler.

The tragedy is that we do not need to imagine a better law. It already existed. The Prevention, Remedy, and Protection against Enforced Disappearance Ordinance, 2025, and the National Human Rights Commission Ordinance, 2025, gave us a judicially chaired selection committee, a commission with its own budget and rules, and above all independent investigators appointed and supervised outside police command, with an explicit bar on any force investigating its own members. Those ordinances were largely praised internationally and trusted domestically. The government allowed them to lapse, and the NHRC commissioners appointed under them resigned rather than preside over a hollowed shell. Their resignation was an act of integrity while the lapse was policy.

That is why the way forward is not another round of drafting, committee or set of clever clauses. There is no alternative but to reinstate the 2025 ordinances word for word, and to reappoint the commissioners who resigned when the NHRC ordinance was allowed to die. Every safeguard the parliament deleted on September 6 can be restored, only the will is missing.

Some colleagues on the treasury benches ask why I return to this subject again and again. I return because I must. I came back from the dark cells; hundreds did not. Every time I rise in that chamber, I speak for those who never returned, whose chairs are still empty at their family tables, whose children have grown up learning to say “missing” in relation to their fathers. Their families did not get a body to bury or a grave to visit. The least this parliament owes them is a law with the power to answer the question they have asked for years: where is he?

I also return for a second reason, which is not about the past at all. It is about our children. The July uprising was made possible by the youth, boys and girls who spoke their minds in the face of bullets. We buried too many of them. The debt we owe the fallen is not paid with monuments; it is paid by building a Bangladesh in which speaking your mind carries no price. A country where a student can criticise the government at a tea stall, post his opinion on social media at midnight, march in the morning without his mother lying awake wondering if he will come home. That is the whole test of everything we do in this parliament. A state that reserves for itself the machinery of disappearance, and then writes laws ensuring that machinery can never be independently examined, fails that test before it begins.

So let there be no ambiguity about what happens next. We walked out, but we have not walked away. I will table the amendments. I will move the resolutions. I will raise this in every forum this parliament provides and every international forum beyond it, for as long as it takes. They passed a black law over our black cloth. We will keep fighting until the cloth comes off our mouths, and off this republic’s eyes.

Because I was in Aynaghor, and I know what waits in the dark. No child of this soil should ever see it.

Barrister Mir Ahmad Bin Quasem (Arman) is a member of parliament for Dhaka-14, adviser on foreign affairs to the leader of the opposition, and a survivor of enforced disappearance (2016-2024). He is the author of the memoir ‘Aynaghar er shakkhi: Goom jiboner aat bochhor.’

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

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