(From previous issue) :
Freedom of Movement……….
The law provides for freedom of movement within the country, foreign travel, emigration, and repatriation, and the government generally respected these rights, except in two sensitive areas, the CHT and Cox’s Bazar.
The government did not fully cooperate with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and other humanitarian organizations in providing protection and assistance to refugees, asylum seekers, stateless persons, and other persons of concern. For example, the government did not allow the UNHCR to expand services to all persons the UNHRC deemed of concern.
Foreign Travel: Some senior opposition officials reported extensive delays in getting their passports renewed; others reported harassment and delays at the airport when departing the country. The international travel ban continued on war crimes suspects from the 1971 independence war.
The country’s passports are invalid for travel to Israel.
Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs)
Low-level armed conflict in the CHT in 1973-97 displaced tens of thousands of indigenous persons internally. During the conflict the government relocated landless Bengalis from the plains with the unstated objective of changing the demographic balance in the CHT toward a Bengali majority.
The IDPs in the CHT had limited physical security. Indigenous community leaders maintained that settlers’ violations of indigenous persons’ rights, sometimes with the involvement of security forces, were widespread.
The IDPs in the CHT also lacked sufficient access to courts and legal aid. The CHT Commission, composed of experts from inside and outside the country who sought to promote respect for rights in the CHT, found that a lack of information and lawyers to assist indigenous persons hindered IDP access to justice. The commission reported settlers expropriated indigenous land using false titles, intimidation, force, fraud, and manipulation of government eminent-domain claims (see section 6).
The number of IDPs in the CHT remained disputed. In 2000 a government task force estimated the number to be 500,000, which included nonindigenous persons. The CHT Commission estimated that there were slightly more than 90,000 indigenous IDPs. The prime minister pledged to resolve outstanding land disputes in the CHT to facilitate the return of the IDPs and to close the remaining military camps, but the task force on IDPs remained unable to function due to a dispute over classifying settlers as IDPs. The commission reported the displacement of several indigenous families to create border guard camps and army recreational facilities. No land disputes were resolved during the year.
Protection of Refugees
The government and the UNHCR provided temporary protection and basic assistance to approximately 32,000 Rohingya refugees from Burma living in two official camps (Kutupalong and Nayapara). The government and the UNHCR estimated an additional 200,000-500,000 undocumented Rohingya lived in various villages and towns outside the two official refugee camps. Most of these undocumented Rohingya lived among the local population in Teknaf and Ukhyia subdistricts in Cox’s Bazar District, including approximately 42,000 at an unofficial site adjacent to the official Kutupalong refugee camp and 15,000 at a site called Leda. Led by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the government during the year released and took initial steps to implement a national strategy on Rohingya with six key elements: border management, addressing security threats, humanitarian assistance, strengthened engagement with Burma, internal coordination on Rohingya problems, and surveying the undocumented Rohingya.
In July the government issued a circular instructing local registrars not to register marriages between Rohingya refugees and citizens. Registration under the Foreign Marriage Act is available only to residents of the country. Many marriages between citizens were unregistered, creating social vulnerability, especially for women and children.
Access to Asylum: The law does not provide for granting asylum or refugee status, nor has the government established a formal system for providing protection to refugees. The government provided some protection to Rohingya refugees from Burma already resident in the country, but it continued to deny asylum to the undocumented Rohingya, whom it categorized as illegal economic migrants. While the government cooperated with the UNHCR in providing temporary protection and basic assistance to registered refugees already resident in two official camps, it did not allow the UNHCR to expand services to undocumented Rohingya or to new arrivals fleeing violence in bordering Rakhine State, Burma, all of whom were persons of concern to the UNHCR.
Refoulement: Continued violence and human rights abuses against the Rohingya in Burma prevented the safe and voluntary return of refugees to their homes. Between January and March, according to the UNHCR, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Border Guard Bangladesh forcibly turned back an estimated 1,600 Rohingya to Burma. According to the UNHCR, which maintained a field presence in both countries, many of these individuals were likely entitled to refugee status and protection. Despite these expulsions, the border remained porous, and the UNHCR noted the existence of considerable daily cross-border movement for trade, smuggling, and illegal migration.
Refugee Abuse: The UNHCR reported cases of refugee abuse, including rape, assault, domestic violence, deprivation of food, arbitrary detention, and documentation problems.
Employment: The government did not allow Rohingya refugees living in the country to work locally. Refugees had limited freedom of movement beyond the camps and had to obtain permission for all movement outside the camps. Despite these constraints some refugees worked illegally as manual laborers or rickshaw pullers in the informal economy. Undocumented Rohingya also worked illegally, mostly in day-labor jobs.
Access to Basic Services: Working with the UNHCR, the government continued to improve some aspects of the official refugee camps following findings in recent years that sanitation, nutrition, and shelter conditions had fallen below minimum international standards. Some basic needs remained unmet, and the camps remained overcrowded, with densities on par with the country’s urban slums.
A 2012 nutrition survey report from the UNHCR and World Food Program stated the prevalence of malnourished (stunted) and underweight children in refugee camps remained higher than in the rest of the country and above the emergency threshold levels set by the World Health Organization.
Public education, while mandatory as of 2010 through eighth grade throughout the country, was offered only through seventh grade in the camps, compared with fifth grade in previous years. Government authorities did not allow refugees outside the camps to attend school, but some did so.
Government authorities did not allow registered or unregistered Rohingya formal and regular access to public health care. Instead, the UNHCR and NGOs provided basic health services in the official camps to registered refugees. Although humanitarian assistance provided by NGOs served registered Rohingya refugees, undocumented Rohingya, and the local population, the government’s restrictions on NGO activities outside the camps limited the unregistered population’s access to basic medical care and other services.
International NGOs faced difficulties in providing basic services to undocumented Rohingya and to the surrounding impoverished host communities due to extended delays by the NGO Affairs Bureau in granting permission for them to operate.
In August the government issued a temporary authorization allowing international organizations and international NGOs to continue providing basic assistance, such as water, sanitation, health care, and education, to registered and some unregistered Rohingya.
Registered refugees did not have the right to legal recourse through the formal legal system, although they were able to take legal complaints to a local camp official, who could mediate disputes. Members of the unregistered population had no legal protection and were sometimes arrested because the government viewed them as illegal economic migrants.
Stateless Persons
The Rohingya in Bangladesh are legally stateless. They cannot derive citizenship from birth in the country, marriage with local citizens, or any other means.
Section 3. Respect for Political Rights: The Right of Citizens to Change Their GovernmentShare
The constitution provides citizens the ability to change their government through free and fair elections, but recent national elections were marred by violence and an opposition boycott.
Elections and Political Participation
Recent Elections: The main opposition party boycotted the January 5 parliamentary elections due to a dispute over the composition of the government that would conduct those elections. More than half of all seats were uncontested, and many more had only nominal contests. Because there were few contests, many voters were unable to exercise their choice. Months of political turbulence and violence preceded the elections as the opposition tried to force the government to concede to its demands. Independent election observers witnessed more than 100 incidents of violence in polling stations or the immediate vicinity and some incidents of voter obstruction and forced voting. Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina and the ruling AL party retained power with 235 out of 300 elected seats. After its boycott of the elections, the BNP held no seats in parliament. The official opposition party, the Jatiya Party, which had 36 elected seats, was also part of the ruling coalition. Parties that supported the government held most of the remaining seats. Sheikh Hasina’s cabinet included representatives from the other parties in her coalition.
Multiple sources reported violence, intimidation, and other irregularities in the five rounds of subdistrict local government elections from February through April. Some newspapers published photographs of ruling party activists marking full books of ballots. The nonpartisan civil society network Bangladesh Election Working Group described the overall integrity of the polling process as undermined by the scale of violations relating to fraudulent activity-with later rounds reportedly having more rigging, violence, and intimidation.
Political Parties and Political Participation: Voter participation in the January 5 election was low, following the boycott by the BNP. Election Commission figures showed an average 40 percent turnout in the 147 constituencies that had contests, compared with more than 80 percent in 2009. No votes were cast in 153 constituencies that had only a single candidate.
In some instances the government interfered with the right of opposition parties to organize public functions and restricted the broadcasting of opposition political events. Jamaat’s appeal of a 2012 Supreme Court decision cancelling the party’s registration continued.
Participation of Women and Minorities: There are no laws preventing women or minorities from voting or participating in political life. Women are eligible to contest any of the 300 directly elected seats in parliament, and an additional 50 seats are reserved for women. There were 70 women in parliament, 20 directly elected and 50 chosen by political parties based on their proportional representation in parliament. The opposition leader, the deputy leader of parliament, and one cabinet minister were women. Two women served at the state ministerial level. Shirin Sharmin Chaudhury was re-elected as speaker of parliament.
There is no provision to reserve parliamentary seats for minorities.
Corruption and Lack of Transparency in Government
The law provides criminal penalties for corruption by officials, but the government did not implement the law effectively. Human rights groups, the media, the Anticorruption Commission (ACC), and other institutions reported government corruption. Officials frequently engaged in corrupt practices with impunity.
Corruption: The ACC is the government agency charged with fighting corruption. According to a 2010 World Bank report, the government undermined the ACC’s work and hampered the prosecution of corruption. The report stated the government filed far fewer corruption cases than the previous caretaker government and that a government commission recommended the ACC drop thousands of corruption cases.
Transparency International Bangladesh cited a UN Convention Against Corruption civil society coalition report that stated in 2011 the government asked the ACC to withdraw 10,536 cases. The 16th constitutional amendment extended parliamentary impeachment power to the ACC, Election Commission, National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), and other constitutional commissions. Some in civil society stated the government was not serious about fighting corruption and that it used the ACC for politically motivated prosecutions. Transparency International Bangladesh asserted that political interference in the ACC’s operations had rendered it a “toothless tiger.” A 2013 amendment to the ACC Law removed the ACC’s authority to sue public servants without prior government permission.
In September the ACC dropped all charges in the Padma Bridge corruption scandal, stating its investigators did not find any evidence of involvement of the accused in a corruption conspiracy.
The government took steps to address widespread police corruption. The inspector general of police continued to train police to address corruption and create a more responsive police force. No assessment of the training’s effect on corruption within the police force was available.
The government subjected the judiciary to political pressure (see section 1.e.), and cases involving opposition leaders often proceeded in an irregular fashion.
(To be continued)
Freedom of Movement……….
The law provides for freedom of movement within the country, foreign travel, emigration, and repatriation, and the government generally respected these rights, except in two sensitive areas, the CHT and Cox’s Bazar.
The government did not fully cooperate with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and other humanitarian organizations in providing protection and assistance to refugees, asylum seekers, stateless persons, and other persons of concern. For example, the government did not allow the UNHCR to expand services to all persons the UNHRC deemed of concern.
Foreign Travel: Some senior opposition officials reported extensive delays in getting their passports renewed; others reported harassment and delays at the airport when departing the country. The international travel ban continued on war crimes suspects from the 1971 independence war.
The country’s passports are invalid for travel to Israel.
Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs)
Low-level armed conflict in the CHT in 1973-97 displaced tens of thousands of indigenous persons internally. During the conflict the government relocated landless Bengalis from the plains with the unstated objective of changing the demographic balance in the CHT toward a Bengali majority.
The IDPs in the CHT had limited physical security. Indigenous community leaders maintained that settlers’ violations of indigenous persons’ rights, sometimes with the involvement of security forces, were widespread.
The IDPs in the CHT also lacked sufficient access to courts and legal aid. The CHT Commission, composed of experts from inside and outside the country who sought to promote respect for rights in the CHT, found that a lack of information and lawyers to assist indigenous persons hindered IDP access to justice. The commission reported settlers expropriated indigenous land using false titles, intimidation, force, fraud, and manipulation of government eminent-domain claims (see section 6).
The number of IDPs in the CHT remained disputed. In 2000 a government task force estimated the number to be 500,000, which included nonindigenous persons. The CHT Commission estimated that there were slightly more than 90,000 indigenous IDPs. The prime minister pledged to resolve outstanding land disputes in the CHT to facilitate the return of the IDPs and to close the remaining military camps, but the task force on IDPs remained unable to function due to a dispute over classifying settlers as IDPs. The commission reported the displacement of several indigenous families to create border guard camps and army recreational facilities. No land disputes were resolved during the year.
Protection of Refugees
The government and the UNHCR provided temporary protection and basic assistance to approximately 32,000 Rohingya refugees from Burma living in two official camps (Kutupalong and Nayapara). The government and the UNHCR estimated an additional 200,000-500,000 undocumented Rohingya lived in various villages and towns outside the two official refugee camps. Most of these undocumented Rohingya lived among the local population in Teknaf and Ukhyia subdistricts in Cox’s Bazar District, including approximately 42,000 at an unofficial site adjacent to the official Kutupalong refugee camp and 15,000 at a site called Leda. Led by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the government during the year released and took initial steps to implement a national strategy on Rohingya with six key elements: border management, addressing security threats, humanitarian assistance, strengthened engagement with Burma, internal coordination on Rohingya problems, and surveying the undocumented Rohingya.
In July the government issued a circular instructing local registrars not to register marriages between Rohingya refugees and citizens. Registration under the Foreign Marriage Act is available only to residents of the country. Many marriages between citizens were unregistered, creating social vulnerability, especially for women and children.
Access to Asylum: The law does not provide for granting asylum or refugee status, nor has the government established a formal system for providing protection to refugees. The government provided some protection to Rohingya refugees from Burma already resident in the country, but it continued to deny asylum to the undocumented Rohingya, whom it categorized as illegal economic migrants. While the government cooperated with the UNHCR in providing temporary protection and basic assistance to registered refugees already resident in two official camps, it did not allow the UNHCR to expand services to undocumented Rohingya or to new arrivals fleeing violence in bordering Rakhine State, Burma, all of whom were persons of concern to the UNHCR.
Refoulement: Continued violence and human rights abuses against the Rohingya in Burma prevented the safe and voluntary return of refugees to their homes. Between January and March, according to the UNHCR, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Border Guard Bangladesh forcibly turned back an estimated 1,600 Rohingya to Burma. According to the UNHCR, which maintained a field presence in both countries, many of these individuals were likely entitled to refugee status and protection. Despite these expulsions, the border remained porous, and the UNHCR noted the existence of considerable daily cross-border movement for trade, smuggling, and illegal migration.
Refugee Abuse: The UNHCR reported cases of refugee abuse, including rape, assault, domestic violence, deprivation of food, arbitrary detention, and documentation problems.
Employment: The government did not allow Rohingya refugees living in the country to work locally. Refugees had limited freedom of movement beyond the camps and had to obtain permission for all movement outside the camps. Despite these constraints some refugees worked illegally as manual laborers or rickshaw pullers in the informal economy. Undocumented Rohingya also worked illegally, mostly in day-labor jobs.
Access to Basic Services: Working with the UNHCR, the government continued to improve some aspects of the official refugee camps following findings in recent years that sanitation, nutrition, and shelter conditions had fallen below minimum international standards. Some basic needs remained unmet, and the camps remained overcrowded, with densities on par with the country’s urban slums.
A 2012 nutrition survey report from the UNHCR and World Food Program stated the prevalence of malnourished (stunted) and underweight children in refugee camps remained higher than in the rest of the country and above the emergency threshold levels set by the World Health Organization.
Public education, while mandatory as of 2010 through eighth grade throughout the country, was offered only through seventh grade in the camps, compared with fifth grade in previous years. Government authorities did not allow refugees outside the camps to attend school, but some did so.
Government authorities did not allow registered or unregistered Rohingya formal and regular access to public health care. Instead, the UNHCR and NGOs provided basic health services in the official camps to registered refugees. Although humanitarian assistance provided by NGOs served registered Rohingya refugees, undocumented Rohingya, and the local population, the government’s restrictions on NGO activities outside the camps limited the unregistered population’s access to basic medical care and other services.
International NGOs faced difficulties in providing basic services to undocumented Rohingya and to the surrounding impoverished host communities due to extended delays by the NGO Affairs Bureau in granting permission for them to operate.
In August the government issued a temporary authorization allowing international organizations and international NGOs to continue providing basic assistance, such as water, sanitation, health care, and education, to registered and some unregistered Rohingya.
Registered refugees did not have the right to legal recourse through the formal legal system, although they were able to take legal complaints to a local camp official, who could mediate disputes. Members of the unregistered population had no legal protection and were sometimes arrested because the government viewed them as illegal economic migrants.
Stateless Persons
The Rohingya in Bangladesh are legally stateless. They cannot derive citizenship from birth in the country, marriage with local citizens, or any other means.
Section 3. Respect for Political Rights: The Right of Citizens to Change Their GovernmentShare
The constitution provides citizens the ability to change their government through free and fair elections, but recent national elections were marred by violence and an opposition boycott.
Elections and Political Participation
Recent Elections: The main opposition party boycotted the January 5 parliamentary elections due to a dispute over the composition of the government that would conduct those elections. More than half of all seats were uncontested, and many more had only nominal contests. Because there were few contests, many voters were unable to exercise their choice. Months of political turbulence and violence preceded the elections as the opposition tried to force the government to concede to its demands. Independent election observers witnessed more than 100 incidents of violence in polling stations or the immediate vicinity and some incidents of voter obstruction and forced voting. Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina and the ruling AL party retained power with 235 out of 300 elected seats. After its boycott of the elections, the BNP held no seats in parliament. The official opposition party, the Jatiya Party, which had 36 elected seats, was also part of the ruling coalition. Parties that supported the government held most of the remaining seats. Sheikh Hasina’s cabinet included representatives from the other parties in her coalition.
Multiple sources reported violence, intimidation, and other irregularities in the five rounds of subdistrict local government elections from February through April. Some newspapers published photographs of ruling party activists marking full books of ballots. The nonpartisan civil society network Bangladesh Election Working Group described the overall integrity of the polling process as undermined by the scale of violations relating to fraudulent activity-with later rounds reportedly having more rigging, violence, and intimidation.
Political Parties and Political Participation: Voter participation in the January 5 election was low, following the boycott by the BNP. Election Commission figures showed an average 40 percent turnout in the 147 constituencies that had contests, compared with more than 80 percent in 2009. No votes were cast in 153 constituencies that had only a single candidate.
In some instances the government interfered with the right of opposition parties to organize public functions and restricted the broadcasting of opposition political events. Jamaat’s appeal of a 2012 Supreme Court decision cancelling the party’s registration continued.
Participation of Women and Minorities: There are no laws preventing women or minorities from voting or participating in political life. Women are eligible to contest any of the 300 directly elected seats in parliament, and an additional 50 seats are reserved for women. There were 70 women in parliament, 20 directly elected and 50 chosen by political parties based on their proportional representation in parliament. The opposition leader, the deputy leader of parliament, and one cabinet minister were women. Two women served at the state ministerial level. Shirin Sharmin Chaudhury was re-elected as speaker of parliament.
There is no provision to reserve parliamentary seats for minorities.
Corruption and Lack of Transparency in Government
The law provides criminal penalties for corruption by officials, but the government did not implement the law effectively. Human rights groups, the media, the Anticorruption Commission (ACC), and other institutions reported government corruption. Officials frequently engaged in corrupt practices with impunity.
Corruption: The ACC is the government agency charged with fighting corruption. According to a 2010 World Bank report, the government undermined the ACC’s work and hampered the prosecution of corruption. The report stated the government filed far fewer corruption cases than the previous caretaker government and that a government commission recommended the ACC drop thousands of corruption cases.
Transparency International Bangladesh cited a UN Convention Against Corruption civil society coalition report that stated in 2011 the government asked the ACC to withdraw 10,536 cases. The 16th constitutional amendment extended parliamentary impeachment power to the ACC, Election Commission, National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), and other constitutional commissions. Some in civil society stated the government was not serious about fighting corruption and that it used the ACC for politically motivated prosecutions. Transparency International Bangladesh asserted that political interference in the ACC’s operations had rendered it a “toothless tiger.” A 2013 amendment to the ACC Law removed the ACC’s authority to sue public servants without prior government permission.
In September the ACC dropped all charges in the Padma Bridge corruption scandal, stating its investigators did not find any evidence of involvement of the accused in a corruption conspiracy.
The government took steps to address widespread police corruption. The inspector general of police continued to train police to address corruption and create a more responsive police force. No assessment of the training’s effect on corruption within the police force was available.
The government subjected the judiciary to political pressure (see section 1.e.), and cases involving opposition leaders often proceeded in an irregular fashion.
(To be continued)
