President Mirza Fakhrul Islam Alamgir sounded emphatic on Sunday when he said, "There will be no more Aynaghar in independent Bangladesh." No mother, he said, should again have to shed tears for a missing son, no wife for a missing husband. Those responsible for enforced disappearances, however powerful they may be, must face justice and receive the maximum punishment prescribed by law, he told an event organised on the occasion of ' International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances' in Dhaka.
For a country that has just come out of a period that had witnessed the incidents of forced disappearance regularly, words coming out of a person none other than the head of State matter. They offer recognition to families who have spent years waiting for answers and to victims who survived secret detention centres.
The real test of the president's pledge will be what the State delivers ultimately. It will depend on whether Bangladesh creates a system capable of investigating such heneous crimes independently, impartially and without fear or favour.
That question has become particularly urgent with the disappearance of Miraz Sheikh of Mongla, Bagerhat.
His wife and family allege that Coast Guard personnel took him away after the evening of 10 April. The Coast Guard has denied the allegation. Yet, despite a general diary, appeals to government authorities, a press conference and even intervention by the High Court, Miraz remains missing. On 12 July, the High Court ordered the relevant authorities, including law enforcement agencies, to find him and produce him before the court within 15 working days. By 24 August, his family said they had still received no answer about his whereabouts.
The case is particularly troubling because it sits uneasily alongside the government's assertion that there has been no enforced disappearance or extrajudicial killing since it assumed office.
If that is so, what happened to Miraz Sheikh?
And if a state security agency is accused of taking someone away, who investigates the allegation?
Those are not merely questions about one disappearance. They go to the heart of whether Bangladesh has genuinely broken with the culture of impunity that allowed enforced disappearance to flourish.
The government's proposed Enforced Disappearance Prevention and Redress Bill 2026 has therefore arrived at a critical moment. It is intended to replace the ordinance introduced by the interim government in December 2025 after Bangladesh joined the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance. But in several important respects, the new legislation appears to weaken the institutional safeguards that made the earlier ordinance significant.
Under the 2025 ordinance, the National Human Rights Commission occupied a central position in investigating allegations. Complaints could be submitted directly to the commission. Even when a complaint was lodged with police or a first-class magistrate, it had to be forwarded to the commission within 24 hours. The commission appointed investigators, supervised investigations and forwarded reports to a special tribunal.
It also had the power to inspect prisons, lock-ups, detention centres and other places under Bangladesh's control where secret detention might be suspected.
That architecture reflected a simple but essential principle: when the allegation concerns abuse of state power, the investigation should not be left to the institutions whose members might be involved.
The new bill takes a different approach.
It does contain an important safeguard. If members of a particular disciplined force are accused of enforced disappearance, that force will not be allowed to investigate the case itself. Another force or an inter-agency investigation team may be assigned the task, either following an application or at the government's initiative.
But this raises another question: how independent can an investigation be if the investigator remains within the state security apparatus and the government decides who conducts it?
The commission that investigated disappearances found instances in which victims were allegedly taken away by men in civilian clothes. Members of one agency sometimes reportedly used the identity of another. The commission documented allegations involving multiple security and intelligence agencies, including cases in which one institution allegedly took a person into custody, another held the individual and yet another became involved later.
In such circumstances, identifying the responsible force at the beginning of an investigation may itself be difficult. If the family does not know who took the victim, the proposed provision barring the accused force from investigating offers limited protection.
There is an even deeper concern. Bangladesh's international obligations require allegations of enforced disappearance to be examined promptly and impartially, with effective investigation where necessary. The process must also protect complainants, witnesses and relatives from intimidation or retaliation.
Independence, therefore, cannot simply mean transferring a case from one security agency to another.
It must mean independence from the security apparatus itself.
The previous ordinance also recognised an important distinction between finding a missing person and prosecuting those responsible. The search for a disappeared person was required to continue until the person was found or his or her fate became known. Families were to receive periodic updates.
That principle should remain central to the new law.
A disappearance is not resolved merely because a criminal investigation has been opened. For families, the first and most urgent question is always: where is our loved one?
The proposed law also removes another important feature of the earlier framework: the special tribunal for enforced disappearance. Under the ordinance, special tribunals could be established at divisional or district level, with judges of district and sessions rank. The new bill instead leaves trials to ordinary sessions courts.
Ordinary courts are indispensable to the rule of law. But enforced disappearance cases can be extraordinarily complex. They may involve secret detention facilities, military and intelligence records, chains of command, multiple agencies, forensic evidence and allegations stretching over years. Judges, prosecutors and investigators will require specialised expertise to handle such cases effectively.
A law can impose the death penalty and still fail to deliver justice if its investigative machinery is inadequate.
There is also a deeply personal dimension to this debate.
The Home Minister, Salahuddin Ahmed, was himself a victim of enforced disappearance. His abduction and subsequent emergence in a foreign country placed him among the many Bangladeshis who experienced first-hand the terror and uncertainty that families of the disappeared have endured.
That history gives the government an unusual moral responsibility.
It should reconsider the institutional architecture of the bill before it becomes law. The investigation of enforced disappearance should be placed in the hands of an authority genuinely independent of the police, military, intelligence and other security agencies. That authority should have unrestricted access to detention facilities, records and officials, as well as the power to protect witnesses and families.
There should also be a clear mechanism for maintaining comprehensive detention registers: who was detained, when, by whom, where the person was taken and when and to whom the detainee was transferred. A person should not be able to vanish administratively simply because the institutions involved failed to leave a paper trail.
The disappearance commission identified 1,569 cases as enforced disappearances and found that 287 of those missing were dead. Its findings described a pattern in which disappearances increased around elections and political opponents were allegedly targeted. These are not isolated crimes committed in the shadows by rogue individuals. They point to a system in which state institutions were allegedly used to suppress dissent.
President Fakhrul is right to describe this as one of the darkest and most shameful chapters in Bangladesh's history.
His vision of a country where political disagreement exists without political vengeance, where freedom of expression is not accompanied by fear, and where state power remains subordinate to the constitution and law is precisely the Bangladesh that victims and their families deserve.
But that vision will be judged by relevant institutions, not speeches.
The nation expects a law strong enough to prevent it, an investigation system independent enough to expose it, courts capable enough to punish it and safeguards robust enough to ensure it never becomes an instrument of state power again.
The ultimate objective should not simply be to punish yesterday's perpetrators. It should be to bury the culture of enforced disappearance forever.
