The term “human rights” refers to those rights that society has agreed are fundamental to people everywhere, such as the right to life. These are rights irrespective of creed, caste, religion and race.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) is the primary international articulation of the fundamental and inalienable rights of all members of the human race adopted by the United Nations General assembly in 1948. The UDHR consists of 30 articles.
The economic, social, and cultural rights are the right to social security, the right to work, the right to equal pay for equal work, the right to form and join trade unions, the right to rest and leisure including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodical holidays with pay, the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of a person and his family, the right to education, and the right to freely participate in the cultural life of the community.
There has been disagreement over what constitutes a human right since the signing of the universal declaration of human rights (UNDHR). As a result, two covenants were adopted in 1966 to give legal force to the universal declaration of human rights (UNDHR).
The Vienna Declaration of 1993 stated: “All human rights are universal, indivisible, interdependent, and interrelated … while the significance of national and regional peculiarities and various historical, cultural, and religious backgrounds must be borne in mind, it is the duty of States, regardless of their political, economic and cultural systems, to promote and protect all human rights and fundamental freedoms.”
Bangladesh endorses the values of the universal declaration of human rights (UDHR). Most of the rights set forth in the declaration have been inserted in our constitution. Bangladesh has signed and ratified the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. It has also signed the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and many other international conventions on human rights, like the Convention on the Rights of the Child 1989, the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women, 1979 etc. But how respectful are our governments in following these international covenants?
Freedom from fear today appears to be one of the burning issues that Bangladesh should be concerned with. The issue of human rights violations is largely discussed and debated in public. Human rights are the most basic and innate rights of a person, which he derives by the very virtue of being human.
We do not receive these rights from any superior entity. Rather the state has been vested with the duty of protecting our rights.
These are rights without which one cannot flourish as a human, cannot explore their potential to the greatest possible extent, and cannot claim to have a life worthy of human dignity.
Human rights can be violated only by the state or any other entity authorised by the state. That is the basic distinction between “crime” and “human rights violation.”
We may see at a glance some instances of human rights violations in Bangladesh from the Ain O Salish Kendra (ASK) e-bulletin published on December 12, which occurred since January this year.
A total of 98 burn injuries were recorded, out of which 18 died and 80 were severely injured. Some 433 people were killed in political violence, while 21,024 people were injured in a total of 754 incidents. 176 people allegedly killed by police, BGB and RAB, 109 people were shot dead, and 22 people died due to physical torture in police custody.
Some 31 people were convicted, 26 detained, and 57 died in jail custody. 327 journalists were harassed in different ways, and 32 journalists received death threats. 26 people were killed by the BSF, 12 were shot, 13 were tortured to death, while 83 people were injured, and 215 people were abducted, out of which 129 went missing.
We can have a clear picture from the above data that the overall human rights situation has worsened in Bangladesh. Even the safeguards of human rights, law enforcing agencies of Bangladesh, were involved in extrajudicial killings, forced disappearances, and tortures in custody. We can hardly overlook what has happened in the last two or three months, and how human rights have gotten trampled over by politics devoid of human sensibilities. People are being burned or stoned to death, and the law enforcers seldom hesitate to open fire on opposition activists.
The political parties, who seem to control the situation, albeit from two diametrically opposite positions, must show a greater responsibility in protecting the human rights that are being violated amid the politics of death and destruction.
The government and its law enforcing agencies and political parties are violating human rights. Our big neighbour India’s Border Security Forces (BSF) are killing people indiscriminately. The National Human Rights Commission of Bangladesh was reconstituted in 2009 as a national advocacy institution for human rights promotion and protection. But it seems quite ineffective. It is yet to prove itself. Now the question arises: Who will be the defender of human rights?