Bangladesh has spent years under Sheikh Hasina’s authoritarian regime confronting a particular question surrouding enforced disappearances. What happens when the people accused of taking someone away are also part of the machinery responsible for finding out what happened?
A new law was supposed to provide an answer. Instead, it may have preserved much of the dilemma.
The Cabinet has granted policy and final approval to the draft Prevention and Remedy of Enforced Disappearance Act, 2026, giving Bangladesh its most expansive legal framework yet for prosecuting a crime that became one of the most notorious allegations against the country's security establishment.
The legislation is ‘sweeping’ in its language and ‘severe’ in its punishment. It recognizes enforced disappearance as a distinct and continuing criminal offense. It allows for life imprisonment and large fines, creates rights to compensation and rehabilitation, establishes deadlines for investigations and trials, and provides a legal mechanism for families to learn the fate of those who vanished.
It also does something potentially historic…it creates clearer civilian jurisdiction for prosecuting members of military-linked agencies and forces accused of enforced disappearance.
But buried inside that glossy overhaul is a provision that goes to the central weakness of the law. The police will investigate.
That is a significant departure from an ordinance adopted by the interim government, which assigned investigative responsibility to the National Human Rights Commission. Under the proposed law, investigations move back into the regular law-enforcement system.
Under Section 14, when a family accuses a security force of carrying out an enforced disappearance, the allegation can effectively be investigated within the same state security structure to which the accused belong.
The police could therefore be placed in the extraordinary position of investigating allegations against the police…or investigating fellow security institutions with which they routinely work.
And if that investigation ultimately leads a court to conclude that an allegation was false, Section 21 provides another twist: The complainant could face as much as five years of rigorous imprisonment.
Together, those provisions expose the central paradox of Bangladesh's new attempt to reckon with enforced disappearance. The law is designed to punish the state for secretly taking people. But it does not establish a fully independent mechanism for determining whether the state did so.
That distinction matters because enforced disappearance is unlike an ordinary kidnapping.
In an ordinary crime, investigators pursue perpetrators outside the state. In an enforced disappearance, the people holding the keys to the evidence may be the very institutions under suspicion.
They may control surveillance records, detention logs, vehicles, communications, intelligence files, command structures and the facilities where victims are alleged to have been held. And because the essence of enforced disappearance is concealment — denying that somebody was detained or refusing to disclose where that person was taken — the absence of an official record may itself be part of the alleged crime.
The weakness becomes more pronounced when political power enters the equation.
If individual officers abduct someone for personal reasons, or if a security unit carries out a disappearance without political authorization, a government determined to prosecute the perpetrators could conceivably use the new law effectively.
But the harder cases are precisely those for which an enforced-disappearance law is most necessary…cases in which a political government itself is alleged to have ordered, encouraged or tolerated the practice.
In that situation, the executive would retain enormous influence over the institutions responsible for investigating an alleged crime committed at the executive's own direction.
The law therefore creates the possibility of accountability without guaranteeing the independence required to produce it.
Human Rights Watch (HRW) has identified much the same problem. Meenakshi Ganguly, the group's deputy Asia director, has warned that assigning investigations to the police would not ensure accountability or establish the safeguards necessary to prevent enforced disappearances from continuing.
The punishment for complaints found to be false adds another layer of concern. There is an obvious state interest in deterring deliberately fabricated accusations. But disappearance cases present a uniquely difficult evidentiary landscape.
Families may have witnesses who saw a relative being taken away but no detention record. They may suspect a particular agency without knowing which unit carried out the operation. They may know when and where someone vanished without being able to prove where the person was subsequently held.
That uncertainty is often inherent to the crime itself.
Making complainants vulnerable to as much as five years of rigorous imprisonment therefore risks turning the state's success in disproving — or failing to substantiate — an allegation into a threat hanging over the family that brought it.
The danger is not simply that innocent complainants could eventually be punished. It is that families may decide not to complain in the first place.
For all those shortcomings, the proposed law is far from meaningless.
Its most significant achievement may be that it formally recognizes enforced disappearance not as an unfortunate byproduct of security operations, but as a distinct crime carrying some of the most severe penalties available under Bangladeshi law.
The maximum punishment is life imprisonment with a fine. If the victim dies, a body is recovered, or the disappeared person cannot be found alive or dead after five years, the punishment can rise to death or life imprisonment, along with a fine of as much as 100 million taka.
The legislation also treats disappearance as a continuing offense, preserving an important principle contained in the interim government's ordinance.
A disappearance, in other words, does not legally end when someone is taken away. It continues as long as the victim's fate or whereabouts remain concealed. For families who have spent years asking where their relatives went, that principle could prove consequential.
The law gives them rights beyond prosecution.
Courts would be empowered to issue search warrants to locate disappeared people. Victims and families would have a right to know how investigations are progressing and to learn the truth about what happened.
Digital evidence would be admissible. Trials could proceed in the absence of an accused person. Witnesses, complainants, whistleblowers and victims would receive confidentiality and security protections.
The state would provide legal aid, medical treatment and rehabilitation. A compensation fund would be created, with compensation first recoverable from the property of convicted perpetrators and, when that is impossible, payable by the state.
There are provisions addressing another cruel consequence of disappearance. What happens to a family financially when a breadwinner legally exists but is nowhere to be found?
Spouses and dependent relatives would be allowed to use the disappeared person's property for maintenance and necessary expenses. After five years, authorities could issue a certificate of disappearance, allowing the person's property to be distributed among heirs.
Investigations would generally have to be completed within 120 days, with another 120-day deadline for trials. A central database would document cases, and mechanisms would be established for international cooperation.
But in some respects, the government has also retreated from the tougher standards of the interim government's ordinance.
Destroying evidence or tampering with material connected to a disappearance remains an offense, but the proposed minimum prison term falls from seven years to five.
The same reduction applies to the construction of secret detention facilities — places that became synonymous in Bangladesh with “Aynaghar,” or “House of Mirrors.” Maintaining such a facility would carry a minimum five-year prison sentence and a fine of up to 20 lakh taka, down from the seven-year minimum under the ordinance.
Those are not minor ancillary offenses.
Secret detention and the destruction of records are among the mechanisms through which enforced disappearance becomes possible. Weakening punishment for them sits awkwardly alongside the government's decision to impose extraordinary penalties for the disappearance itself.
Yet one provision could have implications reaching far beyond disappearance cases.
The legislation creates clearer jurisdiction under civilian law over members of military-linked bodies accused of offenses covered by the act. That is important because allegations surrounding prolonged disappearances in Bangladesh have frequently involved powerful security institutions, particularly the Directorate General of Forces Intelligence (DGFI) and the Rapid Action Battalion (RAB).
For decades under Hasina administration, the relationship between civilian authority and the country's military and intelligence establishment has been one of the recurring tensions in Bangladeshi politics.
A law that makes members of those institutions explicitly answerable before civilian courts for enforced disappearance therefore crosses an important threshold.
It says, in statutory terms, that membership in an armed or military-linked institution does not place an accused person beyond the reach of civilian justice.
That is progress.
The legislation also creates something that did not previously exist with such clarity: future legal exposure for those who govern Bangladesh today.
The same provisions being written to address past disappearances could theoretically be invoked against officials of the current government, or any government that follows it.
A political leadership that permits security agencies to make opponents disappear would be operating in a country where the conduct is explicitly defined as a continuing criminal offense and where a statutory path to prosecution already exists.
Laws, however, are only as independent as the institutions entrusted to enforce them.
Bangladesh's proposed legislation gives victims a vocabulary for the crime, families rights they lacked, courts greater powers and prosecutors severe penalties to pursue. It opens civilian courts more clearly to cases involving members of powerful security bodies.
What it does not fully solve is the question that has always made enforced disappearance so difficult to prosecute.
What happens when the institution searching for the disappeared person belongs to the same state accused of making that person disappear?
Bangladesh has now created a legal road to accountability. It has yet to ensure that the people accused of blocking that road will not also be directing the traffic.
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