Bills meant to shield security forces could ultimately endanger them, says Nabila Idris

Three proposed laws approved by the Cabinet could leave members of Bangladesh’s security forces more vulnerable to prosecution in the future, even though the changes appear designed to shield them from independent scrutiny, former Commission of Inquiry on Enforced Disappearances member Dr Nabila Idris has warned.

Speaking at a program organised by Voice for Reform and Nagarik Coalition on Wednesday, Nabila said the Enforced Disappearance Bill, the National Human Rights Commission Bill and the proposed law replacing the Rapid Action Battalion with a “Special Response Battalion” all contain a common feature: they restrict independent investigations into allegations against security forces.

“When the same feature appears in three different bills at the same time, it cannot be an accident or coincidence,” she said. “It points to a government policy.”

No ‘independent' investigation

According to Nabila, that policy effectively means that when allegations are made against a security force, outside bodies will have little or no independent authority to investigate them.

She argued that this would not only weaken accountability for abuses but could ultimately put officers themselves at greater risk because any protection created by restricting investigations would be temporary. The offences themselves, she noted, would remain crimes, leaving future governments or courts free to reopen cases.

Under the proposed enforced disappearance law, she said, complaints would be routed to the police, which would also be responsible for investigating them. No independent institution would have comparable investigative power.

Nabila said the approach ignores the experience of the Commission of Inquiry on Enforced Disappearances, which received more than 1,500 complaints but found contemporaneous documentary evidence in only around 250.

The reason, she said, was that police frequently refused to accept complaints or general diaries when people went missing.

“If someone was disappeared and the family tried to file a case, the police would often simply not take it,” she said.

Nabila said there had been no fundamental structural transformation of the law-enforcement agencies that would justify assuming this problem had disappeared.

She also warned that the proposed framework could have serious consequences for victims’ families.

The government has said new legal provisions could help families of disappeared people receive compensation and resolve property and inheritance matters. But Nabila said all such benefits would depend on the outcome of the official investigation.

If police refuse to recognise a case as an enforced disappearance, the family would not qualify for those benefits.

Worse, she said, if police conclude that no disappearance occurred, a complainant could potentially face prosecution for filing a false complaint, with penalties of up to five years’ rigorous imprisonment.

Problems with NHRC bill

The NHRC bill, Nabila said, creates a similar problem.

While the commission would be empowered to investigate human rights complaints generally, it would be barred from independently investigating allegations against security forces. Instead, such complaints would be sent to the accused force itself.

That force would then investigate its own members.

Nabila said the proposal sets no clear deadline for such an internal inquiry.

The force could submit a report whenever it chose. The NHRC could then make a recommendation, but the recommendation would not be binding. Another 45 days would have to pass before the commission could take further action if it remained dissatisfied.

By then, she said, the NHRC would still have collected no evidence independently.

“On what basis will the NHRC say it is dissatisfied?” she asked. “It will have no evidentiary basis of its own.”

Nabila also questioned whether the proposed NHRC could be considered institutionally independent.

She said eight of the nine members of the proposed selection committee would be connected to the government or ruling party, including two ministers.

Such a structure, she argued, would undermine the commission’s central purpose: scrutinising abuses committed by powerful state actors who are often difficult to hold accountable through ordinary institutions.

The ‘Aqiqah’ Bill

The third law concerns RAB, which the government proposes to rename the Special Response Battalion.

Nabila said she was reluctant to describe it as a genuine reform bill, arguing that the most visible change was the force’s name.

She jokingly called it an “Aqiqah Bill,” referring to the Islamic naming ceremony for a child.

But she said the renaming itself could have serious implications.

RAB is currently subject to international sanctions, and Nabila argued that those sanctions contributed to a decline in abuses associated with the force.

Renaming the organisation without restructuring it, she warned, could create a situation in which the newly named force operates outside the existing sanctions framework while retaining many of the same personnel, powers and institutional practices.

She said the structural reforms recommended by the disappearance commission had not been incorporated. Instead, the proposed force would receive expanded powers while avenues for accountability would be reduced.

One example, Nabila said, is the proposed grievance-redress mechanism.

Under the bill, allegations against the new force would be considered by a five-member committee.

The committee would be chaired by the force’s own additional director general. Two members would be senior government bureaucrats, one from the Home Ministry. Another would be a government-nominated human rights activist, and the fifth a journalist.

Nabila argued that with three direct state officials and another government nominee, four of the five members would effectively be under government influence.

Such a body, she said, could not credibly function as an independent investigator of alleged abuses committed by a powerful force comprising military and police personnel.

Flawed arguments

She said the government’s argument appears to be that some sensitive operations must occasionally be conducted in the national interest and that officers could become reluctant to carry them out if they feared future prosecution.

Under that reasoning, investigative authority would remain largely within the forces themselves, allowing them to determine whether an action was taken for legitimate national-security reasons or for personal or unlawful purposes.

Nabila said that argument is deeply flawed because reducing independent scrutiny does not change the legal definition of the crime.

Enforced disappearance would remain enforced disappearance. The law does not say that disappearance is legal if carried out for a particular national-security reason.

“What is being changed is not the definition of the crime,” she said. “What is being changed is who can investigate it.”

That distinction, she said, is precisely why the proposed protections could prove dangerous for officers.

A government may temporarily discourage investigations, but it cannot guarantee that a future government will do the same.

Nabila pointed to Bangladesh’s history of “crossfire” killings.

The practice began during the previous BNP-Jamaat government and continued for around two decades, becoming institutionalised through a system in which deaths were routinely followed by official or judicial inquiries that rarely led to accountability.

For years, she said, officers were effectively assured that participation in crossfire killings would carry no legal consequences.

That assurance has now begun to collapse.

Nabila cited the arrest of an officer in connection with the killing of Councillor Ekram, describing it as a crossfire case rather than an enforced disappearance case.

The lesson, she said, is that even assurances lasting 20 years can eventually become worthless.

A change of government is one obvious reason, but she said prosecution can also happen without any change in ruling party.

The Narayanganj seven-murder case, she argued, is an important example.

Examples of ensuing accountability

Nabila said she had spoken extensively in prison with three officers accused in the case and observed how internal disputes helped push evidence into the public domain.

The case showed, she said, that internal conflict within institutions can unravel protection even when the same government remains in power.

At the time, the Awami League was still governing, and RAB officer Tareque Sayeed was the son-in-law of a powerful Awami League leader.

Even that political connection did not prevent his arrest or eventual death sentence.

Nabila said this shows why any promise from a government that officers can commit unlawful acts without being investigated is inherently temporary.

“The ruling party itself may later be unable to keep that assurance,” she said.

If political power changes hands, the risk becomes even greater because a new government can reopen old cases.

That is already happening with past crossfire allegations, she said.

Nabila therefore described any temporary assurance of immunity as “absolute nonsense,” arguing that officers who rely on such protection may be creating long-term risks for their own careers, including the possibility of imprisonment or heavier punishment later.

She said officers seen as politically aligned with the BNP could face the greatest immediate danger under such a system.

When their preferred party is in power, those officers may be more likely to seek influential assignments or present themselves as trusted officials.

They may assume that they will be protected as long as the current government remains in office.

But future administrations could investigate their actions just as cases involving officers associated with the Awami League are being reopened now, Nabila said.

“In that sense, these laws may put BNP-aligned officers themselves at the greatest risk,” she argued.

Vulnerability of junior officers

Junior officers would be another vulnerable group.

Nabila said lower-ranking personnel often receive operational instructions without knowing the full context.

An officer may simply be told to pick somebody up without being told what evidence exists against that person or what ultimately will happen to the detainee.

By carrying out the order, the officer can become implicated in a serious crime without having meaningful control over the operation.

Nabila recalled an incident from the night of August 5, when several detainees were released.

In one case, officers were told to “dispose of” a detainee.

They initially did not understand whether the instruction meant killing the person or releasing him.

The order was in fact to release him, she said, but two officers vomited after hearing it because they believed they were being instructed to kill the detainee.

The episode, she argued, illustrates how junior personnel can become trapped between superior orders and criminal liability.

Laws that weaken independent investigation, she said, risk pushing such officers back into exactly that position.

Nabila also rejected the argument that old abuses become impossible to investigate because evidence disappears over time.

She cited one case investigated by the disappearance commission in which officials initially had almost no usable information.

A witness could remember only that he had travelled in a vehicle one night many years earlier and that each time the vehicle stopped, someone was killed.

He could not remember the date, the victims’ names or the exact location.

Investigators asked whether he remembered anything else that happened around the same time that could establish a reference point.

He recalled that an officer from his battalion had been transferred the next day.

The commission obtained the posting order and used it to establish the date of the killings.

Investigators then searched newspaper reports for bodies found along the relevant route in the following seven days with telltale bullet wounds.

They identified the bodies and then traced the corresponding unnatural-death cases.

The International Crimes Tribunal authorities, she said, provided significant assistance.

Once the witness, bodies and case records were connected, identifying suspects became possible.

Those cases are now being tried, Nabila said. Her point was that crimes committed 12 or 13 years earlier can still leave reconstructable evidence.

Operations involving multiple personnel also create another risk for perpetrators: there is no guarantee every participant will remain silent indefinitely.

That reality, she said, makes government assurances of permanent protection meaningless.

The case of Miraj Sheikh

Nabila also pointed to the case of fisherman Miraj Sheikh as a contemporary example of why internal investigations do not necessarily protect innocent officers.

She said the relevant legal protections lapsed on April 9 and, according to Bangladeshi human rights groups, Sheikh became the first person allegedly subjected to enforced disappearance after the July uprising on April 10.

The Coast Guard has been accused in the case.

Nabila said the Coast Guard has repeatedly investigated itself and denied involvement. Other security bodies operating in the area have also conducted inquiries and said they were not responsible.

But those denials have not removed public suspicion.

She asked observers to assume, for the sake of argument, that the Coast Guard was indeed innocent.

In that scenario, she said, the commander responsible for the area would still have his career placed under a cloud because the institution’s own denial would not be seen as credible.

Until an independent investigation cleared the force, the officer would struggle to remove the suspicion.

Self-investigation therefore fails even as a mechanism for protecting innocent officers, Nabila argued.

The ‘falacy’ of national security issues

She acknowledged that legitimate national-security operations can sometimes require secrecy.

During the disappearance commission’s mapping of clandestine detention facilities, commonly known as Aynaghar, she said investigators reviewed around 1,500 cases, while recognising that many more may never have been documented.

Detainees helped identify facilities by describing neighbouring cells, movements and what they had seen or heard.

Across detention sites linked to three forces, Nabila said she identified only around 10 people she would classify as genuine counterintelligence detainees.

Some were held until August 5 for counterintelligence reasons. In such cases, she said, the national-security argument is valid.

Immediately producing a suspected spy or member of a clandestine network in open court could alert accomplices, compromise intelligence operations or prevent authorities from disrupting an imminent attack.

But the scale matters.

Even if the estimate of 10 were tripled to 30 to account for undercounting, she said, that would still amount to 30 cases against a documented pool of roughly 1,500.

Creating a sweeping legal gap that affects thousands of security personnel and potentially hundreds of thousands of victims for the sake of a few dozen genuinely sensitive cases is not rational, she argued.

Other countries also conduct counterintelligence operations without abandoning legal oversight.

A system of safeguarding

Nabila said they instead build national-security safeguards into the judicial system.

Such mechanisms can include special courts requiring high-level security clearance, lawyers with equivalent clearance and tightly restricted access to sensitive proceedings.

High-security detainees can then be produced before those courts without exposing operational intelligence publicly.

If only a very small number of people have access to sensitive information, any leak can itself be investigated.

The answer, she said, is therefore not to create a broad exemption from independent investigation but to establish tightly controlled legal mechanisms for genuinely sensitive cases.

Nabila concluded by referring to remarks previously made by the President-elect Mirza Fakhrul Islam Alamgir, saying he had been right to support independent investigation of such crimes.

She said she hoped he would remain consistent with that position as president.

The three bills, she warned, should be amended before passage to preserve credible independent investigative authority.

Otherwise, she argued, they could create the paradox of laws intended to protect the security forces that instead expose both victims and officers to even greater danger.

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