London-based human rights campaigner Amnesty International said the proposed Data Protection Act is a sensitive bill aimed at usurping people’s right to privacy in Bangladesh. The Bill uses vague and overbroad provisions to enable and legitimize intrusive actions by authorities, such as granting access to encrypted communication on personal devices physically or remotely. It violates an individual’s rights solely based on pre-empting a law-and-order deterioration without adequate justification.
The Bill exempts authorities from civil, criminal, and any other legal proceedings for harms caused to people in its actions. Keeping in mind how existing laws like the Digital Security Act have led to gross human rights violations in the past, the proposed bill is the newest addition to an insidious pattern in which the government wants to control people’s digital lives. Instead of breaking away from ambiguity in-laws that promotes repressive actions, the proposed bill violates Bangladesh’s constitutional and international obligations, including the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which Bangladesh is a state party.
Amnesty International called the legislature to be respectful to public ownership, participation, transparency, and protection of people’s right to privacy and right to information in the law and that no one, including the authorities, are exempted from accountability for human rights violation. The proposed “Data Protection Act, 2022” aims to trample people’s privacy rights severely and relieves all liability of authorities in accessing people’s data both physically and remotely. The proposed law states that it will have precedence over all existing laws, thereby having an overriding effect on Bangladesh’s Right to Information Act, 2009, which is a crucial instrument that protects people’s right to information in the present time.
Undeniably the proposed law goes against the spirit of democracy, liberation war, and the constitution, but the government is interested in capsizing people’s freedom granted by the constitution.
The government must rethink the proposed Data Protection Law not to be considered a black law and thus mitigate the concern of the people worried about another unwanted law to gag the freedom of expression. We should protest making laws that ultimately go against the value of human dignity.
