(From previous issue) :
Only 27 percent of the mothers received a postnatal checkup from a trained provider within two days of delivery.
Discrimination: The constitution declares all citizens equal before the law, with entitlement to equal protection of the law. It also explicitly recognizes the equal rights of women “in all spheres of the state and of public life.” Nevertheless, women do not enjoy the same legal status and rights as men in family, property, and inheritance law. Under traditional Islamic inheritance law, daughters inherit only half of what sons do, and in the absence of sons, they may inherit only what remains after settling all debts and other obligations. Under Hindu inheritance law, a widow’s rights to her deceased husband’s property are limited to her lifetime and revert to the male heirs upon her death.
Employment opportunities increased for women especially in the lower-wage garment sector. Women represented 80 percent of garment sector workers, but their workforce participation remained low in other parts of the formal economy. Women were sometimes subjected to abuse in factories, including sexual harassment. There were some gender-based wage disparities in the overall economy, but wages of women and men were comparable in the garment sector (see section 7.d.). Women faced difficulty obtaining access to credit and other economic opportunities, but the government’s National Women’s Development Policy included commitments to provide opportunities for women in employment and business.
Children
Despite strong children’s rights legislation, there was a general lack of enforcement due to limited resources and capacity to implement and monitor these laws. Governance remained weak, with responsibility for children held by one of the least-resourced ministries, the Ministry of Women and Children’s Affairs. The legal age of majority is 18. The government, with the assistance of local and foreign NGOs, worked to improve children’s rights and welfare, enabling some progress in improving children’s health, nutrition, and education. The 2013 UESD survey found that 38.7 percent of children remained chronically malnourished, as defined by moderate or severe levels of stunting (height for age). This was a decrease from 41.3 percent of stunting in 2011.
Birth Registration: The law does not grant citizenship automatically by birth within the country. Individuals become citizens if their fathers or grandfathers were born in the territories that are now part of the country. If a person qualifies for citizenship through ancestry, the father or grandfather must have been a permanent resident of these territories in or after 1971. The government began a universal birth registration program in 2005, which increased the registration rate from 10 percent to 51 percent by 2010. Birth registration is required to obtain a national identity card or passport.
Education: Primary education was free and compulsory through fifth grade, and the government offered subsidies to parents to keep girls in class through 10th grade. While teacher fees and uniforms remained prohibitively costly for many families, the government distributed 318 million free textbooks to increase access to education. Enrollments in primary schools showed gender parity, but the percentage of girls declined in later secondary years. The 2010 Education Policy expanded compulsory primary education from grade five to grade eight; however, until the government amends the law to reflect the new primary education period, the policy remained unenforceable. Government incentives to families that sent children to school contributed significantly to increased primary school enrollments in recent years, but hidden school fees at the local level created barriers to access for the poorest families. Many families kept children out of school to become wage earners or to help with household chores, and primary school coverage was insufficient in hard-to-reach and disaster-prone areas. In some cases early and forced marriage was a factor in girls’ attrition from secondary school.
Child Abuse: All forms of child abuse, including sexual abuse, physical and humiliating punishment, child abandonment, kidnapping, and trafficking, continued to be serious and widespread problems. Children were vulnerable to abuse in all settings: home, community, school, residential institutions, and the workplace. Of the 455 incidents of rape against females reported by ASK for the first nine months of the year, 135 were against girls under the age of 19. Of those child victims, 13 were killed after being raped, 29 were victims of gang rape, and two committed suicide after the crime. Local human rights groups reported numerous rapes and rape attempts against girls under age 17 during the year (see also section 1.c.).
In March a teacher raped a five-year-old girl at her school in the Mirpur area of Dhaka. In November, hearing impaired, 10-year-old Moni Akhter was raped and strangled in the Islambagh area of Dhaka. Authorities arrested a man who had made previous advances toward Akhter.
Despite advances, including establishing a monitoring agency in the Ministry of Home Affairs, trafficking of children and providing care and protection to survivors of trafficking continued to be problems. Child labor and abuse at the workplace remained problems in certain industries, mostly in the informal sector, and child domestic workers were vulnerable to all forms of abuse at their informal workplaces.
Early and Forced Marriage: The legal age of marriage is 18 for women and 21 for men, but underage marriage was a widespread problem. Reliable statistics concerning underage marriage were difficult to identify because marriage and birth registrations were sporadic. The UN’s State of the World’s Children 2013 report stated that between 2002 and 2011, 32 percent of women between the ages of 20 and 24 in Bangladesh were married by age 15 and another 34 percent were married by age 18. The government committed to eradicate early and forced marriage by 2035 and marriage under the age of 15 by 2021. In an effort to reduce child marriages, the government offered stipends for girls’ school expenses beyond the compulsory fifth-grade level. The government and NGOs conducted workshops and public events to teach parents the importance of waiting until their daughters were 18 to marry.
Female Genital Mutilation/Cutting (FGM/C): No law specifically prohibits FGM/C. There were no reports of the practice.
Other Harmful Traditional Practices: Because of the low average age of marriage, some children were victims of dowry violence. ASK reported 12 cases of dowry-related physical abuse, including nine cases resulting in death, of children ages 13 to 18 during the first nine months of the year. The Inqilab newspaper reported that in June, Robiul Islam and his mother strangled Islam’s wife, 17-year-old Rabeya Khatun, in a dowry dispute.
According to Odhikar, five children were victims of acid attacks in the first nine months of the year. ASK reported four acid attacks against 13- to 18-year-olds, two against seven- to 12-year-olds, and one against a child age six or younger.
Sexual Exploitation of Children: The penalty for sexual exploitation of children is 10 years’ to life imprisonment. The 2013 Children’s Act defines a child as anyone under age 18. Child pornography and the selling or distributing of such material is prohibited. The Pornography Control Act sets the maximum penalty at 10 years in prison coupled with a fine of 500,000 taka ($6,250). In 2009, the most recent year for such data, the International Labor Organization (ILO) and Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics completed a baseline survey on commercial sexual exploitation of children. According to the survey, of 18,902 child victims of sexual exploitation, 83 percent were girls, 9 percent were transgender children, and 8 percent were boys. The survey reported that 40 percent of the girls and 53 percent of the boys were under age 16, the age of consent when the survey was conducted.
International Child Abductions: The country is not a party to the 1980 Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction. See country-specific information at travel.state.gov/content/childabduction/english/country/bangladesh.html.
Worker Rights
a. Freedom of Association and the Right to Collective Bargaining
The law provides for the protection of the right to join unions and, with government approval, the right to form a union, although restrictions on union registration remained. For example, the law requires a minimum of 30 percent of an enterprise’s total workforce to agree to be members before the Ministry of Labor and Employment may grant approval for a union, and the ministry may request a court to dissolve the union if membership falls below 30 percent. The law allows only wall-to-wall (entire factory) bargaining units. Managerial staff, firefighting staff, security guards, and other employees designated by employers as “confidential” may not join a union. Civil service and security force employees are prohibited from forming unions. The Ministry of Labor and Employment may deregister unions for other reasons with the approval of a labor court. The law affords unions the right of appeal in the cases of dissolution or denial of registration.
The law provides for the right to conduct legal strikes but with many limitations. For example, the government may prohibit a strike deemed to pose a “serious hardship to the community” and may terminate any strike lasting more than 30 days. The law additionally prohibits strikes for the first three years of commercial production or if the factory was built with foreign investment or owned by a foreign investor.
Legally registered unions are entitled to bargain collectively with employers; this occurred rarely, but instances were increasing. Labor organizations reported in some companies workers did not exercise their collective bargaining rights due to their unions’ ability to address grievances with management informally or due to fear of reprisal. Workers at the Raj Washing Plant registered a trade union in January. When they submitted a charter of demands, management terminated 60 workers and filed false criminal charges against union leaders. In contrast, at the Masco Group of garment factories, an initially turbulent relationship resolved into regular union-management meetings on labor problems and workplace improvements.
The law includes provisions protecting unions from employer interference in organizing activities; however, employers, particularly in the ready-made garment industry, often interfered with this right. Labor organizers reported acts of intimidation and abuse, the termination of employees, and scrutiny by security forces and the National Security Intelligence. Labor rights NGOs alleged that some terminated union members were unable to find work in the sector because employers blacklisted them.
On August 27, masked men beat with an iron rod a union organizer and her husband outside the Global Trousers factory, resulting in the organizer’s hospitalization for head injuries. According to union organizers, police initially refused to accept the couple’s complaint.
Amendments to the labor law effective in 2013 require every factory with more than 50 employees to have an elected participation committee, but by year’s end the government had not issued the regulations necessary to implement the requirement.
A separate legal framework under the authority of the Bangladesh Export Processing Zone (EPZ) Authority (BEPZA) governs labor rights in the EPZs. EPZ factory officials interpreted EPZ regulations and applicable law narrowly and claimed they were exempted from broader labor law. EPZ law specifies certain limited associational and bargaining rights for elected worker welfare associations, such as the rights to bargain collectively and represent their members in disputes. While the EPZ law provision banning all strikes under penalty of imprisonment expired in 2013, the law continues to provide for strict limits on the right to strike, such as the discretion of the BEPZA’s chairman to ban any strike he views as prejudicial to the public interest. The law provides for EPZ labor tribunals, appellate tribunals, and conciliators, but those institutions were not yet established. EPZ worker associations are also prohibited from establishing any connection to outside political parties, unions, or NGOs.
With the exception of the limited associational rights and worker protections in the EPZs, national labor law prohibits anti-union discrimination. The Ministry of Labor and Employment formally investigated complaints of unfair union discrimination, although the Solidarity Center reports that it only investigated 11 of 32 cases of antiunion discrimination filed. A labor court may order the reinstatement of workers fired for union activities.
The government did not always enforce applicable law effectively. For example, the Labor Act establishes mechanisms for conciliation, arbitration, and dispute resolution by a labor court; civil servants and security forces are covered under different terms and conditions of employment and file cases in specified courts, such as an administrative tribunal; and workers in a collective-bargaining union have the right to strike in the event of a failure to reach a settlement. In practical terms, few strikes followed the cumbersome legal requirements, and strikes or walkouts often occurred spontaneously, especially at workplaces without unions. Resources at the Ministry of Labor and Employment were inadequate to inspect and remediate problems effectively, but the ministry took steps to increase its staff and technical capacity. Penalties for violating the law were increased in 2013, but absent implementing rules, the new penalties were not applied.
Administrative and judicial appeals were subjected to lengthy delays. Union federations reported that police often failed to accept reports of violence or other crimes against organizers and prounion workers.
In August the NGO Affairs Bureau approved the 2013 registration application of shrimp sector NGO Social Activities for the Environment.
(To be continued)
Only 27 percent of the mothers received a postnatal checkup from a trained provider within two days of delivery.
Discrimination: The constitution declares all citizens equal before the law, with entitlement to equal protection of the law. It also explicitly recognizes the equal rights of women “in all spheres of the state and of public life.” Nevertheless, women do not enjoy the same legal status and rights as men in family, property, and inheritance law. Under traditional Islamic inheritance law, daughters inherit only half of what sons do, and in the absence of sons, they may inherit only what remains after settling all debts and other obligations. Under Hindu inheritance law, a widow’s rights to her deceased husband’s property are limited to her lifetime and revert to the male heirs upon her death.
Employment opportunities increased for women especially in the lower-wage garment sector. Women represented 80 percent of garment sector workers, but their workforce participation remained low in other parts of the formal economy. Women were sometimes subjected to abuse in factories, including sexual harassment. There were some gender-based wage disparities in the overall economy, but wages of women and men were comparable in the garment sector (see section 7.d.). Women faced difficulty obtaining access to credit and other economic opportunities, but the government’s National Women’s Development Policy included commitments to provide opportunities for women in employment and business.
Children
Despite strong children’s rights legislation, there was a general lack of enforcement due to limited resources and capacity to implement and monitor these laws. Governance remained weak, with responsibility for children held by one of the least-resourced ministries, the Ministry of Women and Children’s Affairs. The legal age of majority is 18. The government, with the assistance of local and foreign NGOs, worked to improve children’s rights and welfare, enabling some progress in improving children’s health, nutrition, and education. The 2013 UESD survey found that 38.7 percent of children remained chronically malnourished, as defined by moderate or severe levels of stunting (height for age). This was a decrease from 41.3 percent of stunting in 2011.
Birth Registration: The law does not grant citizenship automatically by birth within the country. Individuals become citizens if their fathers or grandfathers were born in the territories that are now part of the country. If a person qualifies for citizenship through ancestry, the father or grandfather must have been a permanent resident of these territories in or after 1971. The government began a universal birth registration program in 2005, which increased the registration rate from 10 percent to 51 percent by 2010. Birth registration is required to obtain a national identity card or passport.
Education: Primary education was free and compulsory through fifth grade, and the government offered subsidies to parents to keep girls in class through 10th grade. While teacher fees and uniforms remained prohibitively costly for many families, the government distributed 318 million free textbooks to increase access to education. Enrollments in primary schools showed gender parity, but the percentage of girls declined in later secondary years. The 2010 Education Policy expanded compulsory primary education from grade five to grade eight; however, until the government amends the law to reflect the new primary education period, the policy remained unenforceable. Government incentives to families that sent children to school contributed significantly to increased primary school enrollments in recent years, but hidden school fees at the local level created barriers to access for the poorest families. Many families kept children out of school to become wage earners or to help with household chores, and primary school coverage was insufficient in hard-to-reach and disaster-prone areas. In some cases early and forced marriage was a factor in girls’ attrition from secondary school.
Child Abuse: All forms of child abuse, including sexual abuse, physical and humiliating punishment, child abandonment, kidnapping, and trafficking, continued to be serious and widespread problems. Children were vulnerable to abuse in all settings: home, community, school, residential institutions, and the workplace. Of the 455 incidents of rape against females reported by ASK for the first nine months of the year, 135 were against girls under the age of 19. Of those child victims, 13 were killed after being raped, 29 were victims of gang rape, and two committed suicide after the crime. Local human rights groups reported numerous rapes and rape attempts against girls under age 17 during the year (see also section 1.c.).
In March a teacher raped a five-year-old girl at her school in the Mirpur area of Dhaka. In November, hearing impaired, 10-year-old Moni Akhter was raped and strangled in the Islambagh area of Dhaka. Authorities arrested a man who had made previous advances toward Akhter.
Despite advances, including establishing a monitoring agency in the Ministry of Home Affairs, trafficking of children and providing care and protection to survivors of trafficking continued to be problems. Child labor and abuse at the workplace remained problems in certain industries, mostly in the informal sector, and child domestic workers were vulnerable to all forms of abuse at their informal workplaces.
Early and Forced Marriage: The legal age of marriage is 18 for women and 21 for men, but underage marriage was a widespread problem. Reliable statistics concerning underage marriage were difficult to identify because marriage and birth registrations were sporadic. The UN’s State of the World’s Children 2013 report stated that between 2002 and 2011, 32 percent of women between the ages of 20 and 24 in Bangladesh were married by age 15 and another 34 percent were married by age 18. The government committed to eradicate early and forced marriage by 2035 and marriage under the age of 15 by 2021. In an effort to reduce child marriages, the government offered stipends for girls’ school expenses beyond the compulsory fifth-grade level. The government and NGOs conducted workshops and public events to teach parents the importance of waiting until their daughters were 18 to marry.
Female Genital Mutilation/Cutting (FGM/C): No law specifically prohibits FGM/C. There were no reports of the practice.
Other Harmful Traditional Practices: Because of the low average age of marriage, some children were victims of dowry violence. ASK reported 12 cases of dowry-related physical abuse, including nine cases resulting in death, of children ages 13 to 18 during the first nine months of the year. The Inqilab newspaper reported that in June, Robiul Islam and his mother strangled Islam’s wife, 17-year-old Rabeya Khatun, in a dowry dispute.
According to Odhikar, five children were victims of acid attacks in the first nine months of the year. ASK reported four acid attacks against 13- to 18-year-olds, two against seven- to 12-year-olds, and one against a child age six or younger.
Sexual Exploitation of Children: The penalty for sexual exploitation of children is 10 years’ to life imprisonment. The 2013 Children’s Act defines a child as anyone under age 18. Child pornography and the selling or distributing of such material is prohibited. The Pornography Control Act sets the maximum penalty at 10 years in prison coupled with a fine of 500,000 taka ($6,250). In 2009, the most recent year for such data, the International Labor Organization (ILO) and Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics completed a baseline survey on commercial sexual exploitation of children. According to the survey, of 18,902 child victims of sexual exploitation, 83 percent were girls, 9 percent were transgender children, and 8 percent were boys. The survey reported that 40 percent of the girls and 53 percent of the boys were under age 16, the age of consent when the survey was conducted.
International Child Abductions: The country is not a party to the 1980 Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction. See country-specific information at travel.state.gov/content/childabduction/english/country/bangladesh.html.
Worker Rights
a. Freedom of Association and the Right to Collective Bargaining
The law provides for the protection of the right to join unions and, with government approval, the right to form a union, although restrictions on union registration remained. For example, the law requires a minimum of 30 percent of an enterprise’s total workforce to agree to be members before the Ministry of Labor and Employment may grant approval for a union, and the ministry may request a court to dissolve the union if membership falls below 30 percent. The law allows only wall-to-wall (entire factory) bargaining units. Managerial staff, firefighting staff, security guards, and other employees designated by employers as “confidential” may not join a union. Civil service and security force employees are prohibited from forming unions. The Ministry of Labor and Employment may deregister unions for other reasons with the approval of a labor court. The law affords unions the right of appeal in the cases of dissolution or denial of registration.
The law provides for the right to conduct legal strikes but with many limitations. For example, the government may prohibit a strike deemed to pose a “serious hardship to the community” and may terminate any strike lasting more than 30 days. The law additionally prohibits strikes for the first three years of commercial production or if the factory was built with foreign investment or owned by a foreign investor.
Legally registered unions are entitled to bargain collectively with employers; this occurred rarely, but instances were increasing. Labor organizations reported in some companies workers did not exercise their collective bargaining rights due to their unions’ ability to address grievances with management informally or due to fear of reprisal. Workers at the Raj Washing Plant registered a trade union in January. When they submitted a charter of demands, management terminated 60 workers and filed false criminal charges against union leaders. In contrast, at the Masco Group of garment factories, an initially turbulent relationship resolved into regular union-management meetings on labor problems and workplace improvements.
The law includes provisions protecting unions from employer interference in organizing activities; however, employers, particularly in the ready-made garment industry, often interfered with this right. Labor organizers reported acts of intimidation and abuse, the termination of employees, and scrutiny by security forces and the National Security Intelligence. Labor rights NGOs alleged that some terminated union members were unable to find work in the sector because employers blacklisted them.
On August 27, masked men beat with an iron rod a union organizer and her husband outside the Global Trousers factory, resulting in the organizer’s hospitalization for head injuries. According to union organizers, police initially refused to accept the couple’s complaint.
Amendments to the labor law effective in 2013 require every factory with more than 50 employees to have an elected participation committee, but by year’s end the government had not issued the regulations necessary to implement the requirement.
A separate legal framework under the authority of the Bangladesh Export Processing Zone (EPZ) Authority (BEPZA) governs labor rights in the EPZs. EPZ factory officials interpreted EPZ regulations and applicable law narrowly and claimed they were exempted from broader labor law. EPZ law specifies certain limited associational and bargaining rights for elected worker welfare associations, such as the rights to bargain collectively and represent their members in disputes. While the EPZ law provision banning all strikes under penalty of imprisonment expired in 2013, the law continues to provide for strict limits on the right to strike, such as the discretion of the BEPZA’s chairman to ban any strike he views as prejudicial to the public interest. The law provides for EPZ labor tribunals, appellate tribunals, and conciliators, but those institutions were not yet established. EPZ worker associations are also prohibited from establishing any connection to outside political parties, unions, or NGOs.
With the exception of the limited associational rights and worker protections in the EPZs, national labor law prohibits anti-union discrimination. The Ministry of Labor and Employment formally investigated complaints of unfair union discrimination, although the Solidarity Center reports that it only investigated 11 of 32 cases of antiunion discrimination filed. A labor court may order the reinstatement of workers fired for union activities.
The government did not always enforce applicable law effectively. For example, the Labor Act establishes mechanisms for conciliation, arbitration, and dispute resolution by a labor court; civil servants and security forces are covered under different terms and conditions of employment and file cases in specified courts, such as an administrative tribunal; and workers in a collective-bargaining union have the right to strike in the event of a failure to reach a settlement. In practical terms, few strikes followed the cumbersome legal requirements, and strikes or walkouts often occurred spontaneously, especially at workplaces without unions. Resources at the Ministry of Labor and Employment were inadequate to inspect and remediate problems effectively, but the ministry took steps to increase its staff and technical capacity. Penalties for violating the law were increased in 2013, but absent implementing rules, the new penalties were not applied.
Administrative and judicial appeals were subjected to lengthy delays. Union federations reported that police often failed to accept reports of violence or other crimes against organizers and prounion workers.
In August the NGO Affairs Bureau approved the 2013 registration application of shrimp sector NGO Social Activities for the Environment.
(To be continued)
