Bangladesh’s proposed National Human Rights Commission Bill, 2026, arrives with many of the features ordinarily associated with a stronger human rights institution.
Commissioners would serve full time. The commission would have its own investigators. Compensation awards could be enforced through magistrates. A National Preventive Mechanism would be empowered to enter places of detention without notice, examine custody records and interview detainees privately.
Taken separately, these are substantial changes. Taken together with the rest of the bill, however, they produce a more complicated picture…a commission with more machinery but less independence in some of the areas where independence matters most.
An analysis of the bill comparing it with the National Human Rights Commission Act of 2009 and the short-lived 2025 ordinance concludes that the proposed law is weaker than its immediate predecessor on investigative independence, appointments, pluralism and financial autonomy.
More strikingly, the analysis finds that several provisions fall below even the standards of the 2009 law, under which Bangladesh’s commission received only Status B from the Global Alliance of National Human Rights Institutions, or GANHRI.
The central problem is Section 19.
Under the bill, the commission may normally investigate human rights violations using its own officers and teams, who would have investigative powers under the Code of Criminal Procedure.
But when the allegation concerns a “disciplined force” — a category covering institutions at the center of many of Bangladesh’s most serious allegations of state abuse — that authority is displaced.
Instead of sending its investigators, the commission must ask the agency or institution accused in the complaint to submit a report. The analysis describes the result plainly: “The force investigates itself.”
That is not merely a failure to reproduce the stronger protections of the 2025 ordinance. It marks a retreat from the 2009 framework. Under the earlier law, when a disciplined force was accused, the commission requested a report from the government. The new bill directs the request to the accused force itself. Recommendations arising from the process are also sent back to that force rather than to the civilian government.
The distinction may appear procedural, but it changes the chain of accountability. Under the 2009 system, however weak it proved in practice, the civilian government remained formally responsible for answering allegations involving a security agency. Under the 2026 bill, the process becomes more internal. The institution accused of misconduct provides the account against which its own conduct is assessed.
The bill does eventually allow the commission to proceed under the ordinary complaint mechanism if the force fails to respond within a later 45-day stage or if its response is considered unsatisfactory. But this fallback contains its own weakness.
The commission, having been prevented from investigating independently at the beginning, may possess little evidence with which to determine whether the security agency’s version of events is convincing.
The report identifies the practical evidence at risk during such delays: custody records, duty rosters, call data, CCTV footage and medical material. It also notes that the bill sets no deadline for the accused agency’s initial report. The commission could therefore find itself deciding whether it is “satisfied” with an official account without having independently gathered the facts needed to test it.
This is the bill’s defining contradiction. It creates professional investigative capacity and then restricts its use in precisely the category of cases for which an independent human rights commission is most necessary.
Complaints against private actors could benefit considerably from the new investigative powers. Compensation orders, unlike under the 2009 law, could be executed through a first-class magistrate, with imprisonment possible for nonpayment. Yet the analysis argues that Section 19 effectively removes those gains from complaints against disciplined forces.
The significance is heightened by Bangladesh’s recent history. Allegations of enforced disappearance, custodial death and extrajudicial killing have frequently involved the state security bodies. A human rights institution is most useful when ordinary accountability mechanisms are compromised because the alleged perpetrator controls the evidence, the witnesses or even the investigative process. The proposed system leaves that structural problem substantially intact.
The bill also alters who is likely to sit on the commission.
The 2009 Act required at least one member from an ethnic community. The 2025 ordinance went further, providing a guaranteed minority seat and stronger requirements for women’s representation. The 2026 proposal replaces the guaranteed minority representation with a direction that a qualified candidate from an ethnic or disadvantaged community receive priority consideration.
That sounds inclusive, but it creates no obligation to appoint such a person. “Qualified” is not defined, and a commission composed without a single member of an ethnic or disadvantaged minority would still comply with the law.
The appointment structure raises a broader independence question.
The 2025 ordinance placed an Appellate Division judge at the head of the selection committee, excluded cabinet ministers, included academic, press and minority representation and expressly allowed consultation with civil society. The 2026 bill restores the Speaker as chairman and brings the law and home ministers back into the process. Five of the nine committee positions are tied to the government or ruling party.
The committee would also send two names for each vacancy to the president rather than one. Under Article 48(3) of the Constitution, the president acts on the prime minister’s advice in most matters, meaning executive discretion returns at the final stage of appointment.
For an ordinary regulatory agency, such arrangements would invite familiar arguments about political appointments. For a human rights commission, the problem is more direct. The institution exists partly to investigate the government and agencies under government authority.
Its credibility therefore depends not simply on whether individual commissioners act independently, but on whether their selection gives the public reason to believe they can.
The bill contains language describing the commission as independent and requiring impartial conduct. But another change is less reassuring. The 2025 ordinance explicitly stated that the commission would not fall under any ministry or division. That guarantee disappears. The new text preserves a description of independence while removing the clearer institutional barrier against government subordination.
Financial independence moves in the same direction. Under the 2025 ordinance, the government was required to consider the commission’s own budget proposal before fixing its allocation. Under the new bill, the government simply allocates the money. The commission has no statutory right to have its proposal considered. Protection placing commissioners’ remuneration on the Consolidated Fund also disappears.
The National Preventive Mechanism illustrates how these apparently technical changes could have operational consequences.
The mechanism would have unusually important powers: unannounced inspections of prisons and other places of detention, access to custody registers and private interviews with detainees. The report calls it the bill’s most valuable innovation.
But the 2025 ordinance established the mechanism as a division with a separate, secured budget. The 2026 bill turns it into a unit and requires only a “necessary” allocation from the commission’s general funds. Its legal powers remain, but its ability to exercise them becomes dependent on resources that are no longer protected.
Other changes are quieter but consequential.
The 2009 Act allowed the commission to examine proposed laws for consistency with international human rights standards. The new bill limits that scrutiny to existing domestic law. The difference means that the commission could identify a rights problem after legislation has taken effect but would lose its explicit statutory role in warning Parliament beforehand.
The commission also loses an express function to train law-enforcement personnel in human rights, an authority to examine systemic obstacles to human rights protection and a residual clause allowing it to undertake other work necessary for the protection of rights. The 2026 bill lists 13 functions without that open-ended authority; the 2009 law contained 19 and the 2025 ordinance 26.
Legal access for victims is narrowed as well. Under the 2009 Act, providing legal assistance was an express commission function, and the commission could file or arrange an Article 102 application in the High Court for a person whose complaint had been established. The 2025 ordinance added a Legal Action Branch and a panel of experienced lawyers.
Neither mechanism appears in the 2026 bill. Money from the commission’s fund may still be spent on legal assistance, but the statutory machinery for representing complainants or taking cases to court is gone.
Access outside Dhaka would also become conditional. The 2009 law allowed the commission to establish divisional, district and upazila offices as it considered necessary. Under the proposed law, an office outside Dhaka would require prior government approval.
For victims in remote areas, the independence of an institution is not only a constitutional concept; it can be measured by whether they can physically reach it without the executive first deciding that the institution may come closer.
None of this means the bill contains no advances. All commissioners would become full time. Meetings would occur monthly rather than every two months. The commission would gain regulatory autonomy over its own internal procedures. It would have an explicit function involving treatment, rehabilitation and compensation for victims and a duty to protect human rights defenders from harassment. The bill also removes some exclusions inherited from 2009.
The question is whether these additions compensate for the restrictions placed on the institution’s independence and reach.
Internationally, that question has a measurable consequence. GANHRI’s accreditation system assesses national commissions against the Paris Principles, including independence, pluralism, adequate funding and a sufficiently broad mandate. Bangladesh’s commission was given Status B in 2011 and again in 2015, with its restricted ability to investigate security agencies and problems in the appointment process among the reasons cited.
The highlighted comparison in the report repeatedly reaches the same conclusion: on investigative authority over disciplined forces, minority representation, legal access for complainants, breadth of mandate and scrutiny of proposed legislation, the 2026 bill is assessed as below both the 2009 Act and the 2025 ordinance.
The appointment provisions, another highlighted section notes, reproduce a defect that GANHRI had already identified in 2015 as a reason for Bangladesh’s Status B classification.
That creates an unusual political problem for a government legislating after a period in which human rights abuses by state institutions became central to demands for political reform.
The government does not need to dismantle the bill to address its most serious weaknesses. This analysis identifies a comparatively short list of amendments: restore independent investigations of disciplined forces, guarantee minority representation, give the commission a statutory role in proposing its budget and protect the financing of the National Preventive Mechanism.
The larger issue is therefore not whether Bangladesh will have a human rights commission with more staff or more formal powers. On paper, it will.
The test is what happens when the complaint is politically difficult, the accused institution is powerful and the evidence is in the state’s hands. A human rights commission is designed for precisely that moment. The 2026 bill strengthens the institution around its edges while narrowing its authority at the point where that test begins.
—
Dr Nabila Idris is a former member of the Commission of Inquiry on Enforced Disappearances and a former commissioner of the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC)