June 16, 2025
DHAKA – The fallen Sheikh Hasina government abused the Anti-Terrorism Act, 2009 the most to prosecute victims of enforced disappearance, found the commission investigating enforced disappearances.
“As in the rest of the world, terrorism is a genuine threat to Bangladesh, which must be addressed with analytical clarity and institutional resolve. But it must also be addressed with integrity,” said the commission report, adding, “The then government used counterterrorism as a convenient frame to discredit rivals for their political dissent.”
In its second interim report submitted to Chief Adviser Dr Muhammad Yunus on June 6, the Commission of Inquiry on Enforced Disappearances outlined how a large number of people booked under the counterterrorism law were actually victims of enforced disappearance and how the law was used for repression.
“The Anti-Terrorism Act, 2009 stands out as the most frequently invoked law, with 198 victims facing charges under it, far more than any other legislation,” said the report, based on analysis of the cases against 309 victims who were picked up by various state forces long before they were produced before courts.
“The Explosive Substances Act and the Arms Act follow, with 51 and 43 victims respectively.”
Nine victims were also booked under the Information and Communication Technology Act and its successor, the Digital Security Act, and eight victims were booked under the Special Powers Act.
“The over-reliance on broad national security and criminal statutes, such as the Anti-Terrorism Act, suggests a pattern of systemic criminalisation, often without regard for individualised evidence,” said the report.
Terrorism must be countered—but not like this, stated the five-member Commission formed in August last year.
The Commission acquired nationwide data from Anti-Terrorism Tribunals and found that the conviction rate was incredibly low, suggesting there was little or no evidence.
“Of the 794 resolved cases from 2017 to 2024, only 52 resulted in convictions, yielding a conviction rate of just 7 percent. This means the vast majority of the accused (93 percent) were acquitted, despite the free hand law enforcers had in manufacturing these cases, raising serious questions about the evidentiary standards used to initiate such prosecutions,” stated the report.
It also found that the filing of these cases ebbed and flowed with the political climate.
“If indeed anti-terror laws were used agnostic of the political climate, we would not expect to see any relation between political events and case inflows. And yet, surges in case inflows align with periods of heightened political unrest and subsequent law enforcement crackdown.”
The year 2018 saw the most significant spike in the filing of these cases, coinciding with the general election when the opposition parties were particularly repressed, the Commission found.
“Interviews with multiple police officials suggest that increased mobilisation efforts by the BNP and Jamaat-e-Islami in 2022 contributed to sustained filings of cases that year,” said the Commission, noting that the cases filed in 2021 reflected the AL government’s response to mass protests against Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Bangladesh.
“In contrast, opposition activity in 2023 shifted toward more direct street confrontations which, according to senior police officers, were less frequently pursued under anti-terrorism charges,” it said, adding that this corresponded with a decrease in new cases that year.
In 2024, the filing of new cases dropped even more after the general elections because of a decline in political activities by the opposition.
The Commission interviewed multiple police officers who revealed that there are set scripts for these cases. “When a new case needs to be filed, these scripts are reused with minimal changes — often underdeveloped, copy-pasted, and lightly edited to fit the individual.”
Instead of pursuing justice, the system appears to have allowed these cases to linger until they risked embarrassing the judiciary, said the report. “If these anti-terrorism cases were solely about arbitrating the available evidence, we would not expect to see any particular pattern in case resolutions beyond random variation. And yet, there is a revealing pattern in the timing of case outflows.”
The Commission found that the judiciary’s performance was dependent on how many cases were left pending for more than five years – and so the cases which were nearing the five-year mark were found to be quickly disposed of in bulk, with most being acquitted.
“The largest spike in case disposals occurred in 2022, exactly five years after the 2018 surge. This correlation suggests that the judicial system is expediting resolutions to avoid the appearance of backlog, particularly for cases approaching the five-year threshold,” said the report.
The commission members also spoke to judges who confirmed that they are expected to prioritise cases reaching five years.
“The artificial nature of these resolution spikes, coupled with an abysmally low conviction rates, implies that many of these cases lacked prosecutorial merit from the outset,” said the report.
The Commission delved into the first information reports filed by the police, and the confessional statements given by the victims of enforced disappearance to reveal a pattern of coercion and fabrication.
The victims, who were taken out of their enforced disappearance and handed over to the courts, were told that unless they agreed to sign a Section 164 confessional statement as dictated by their captors, they would face severe consequences, like repeated torture, death, a continuation of the disappearance or harm to their family members, the report said.
The victims often found little solace with the magistrates, who ignored obvious signs of coercion and torture, according to the report.
The report cited the experience of a 19-year-old who was kept in a secret prison for over a month by the police’s Counter Terrorism and Transnational Crime Unit in 2020.
“They made me rehearse the format all night beforehand, ‘You will say this and this.’ In the morning, they made me rehearse again, “You will go to court, whatever they ask, you will say exactly this to the magistrate.” I told the magistrate, ‘Sir, I want to speak with you privately…’ When I told the magistrate, ‘Sir, I didn’t do these things. They beat me and forced me to say all this,’ the magistrate said, “Alright, I’ll look into it.” But still, he wrote it down against me,” the victim told the Commission.
A 20-year-old man who was forcibly disappeared for a year by DGFI and Rab in 2016 told the magistrate that he was kept in enforced disappearance, according to the report.
The magistrate then asked the police whether it was true. The police answered by saying, “If they were disappeared, then why are their moustaches trimmed? Why are they wearing clean clothes?”
In reality, the victim was cleaned and shaved the day before to be brought in front of the media. The court granted the police three days of remand, the report said.
In another case, a 19-year-old who was disappeared by the CTTC in 2017 told the Commission that he wanted to speak privately with the magistrate, but he was asked to talk in front of the very people who had kept him illegally for weeks.
The Commission also found that many individuals were subjected to enforced disappearance for expressing their views online and were later accused of posing threats to national security.
A young man, 22, secretly held by the police for over a month for writing about the Road Safety Movement, and prosecuted under the ICT Act, stated the report.
All of the eight victims of enforced disappearance who were charged under the DSA were abducted by Rab and the police and held illegally for up to two weeks before being produced at court.
Another 38-year-old who was forcibly disappeared by the CTTC in 2021 was electrocuted in his genitals for writing about the BDR massacre.
“As soon as they gave electric shock to my genitals, I lost consciousness right there. I don’t know how long I was lying down. After a while I started hearing voices in my ear, they were saying, ‘He’s alive, he’s alive’… After having me stand up, they said, ‘Hang him’. They said, “Don’t you understand? You wrote about the Pilkhana massacre,” the victim told the Commission.
In addition to the torture and illegal detention, victims then shouldered the additional burden of legal expenditure. On average, the families paid Tk 7 lakh each.