A law meant to rebuild Bangladesh’s National Human Rights Commission should widen access to accountability, not make it depend on how quickly a victim reaches the commission. Yet Section 14 of the draft of the National Human Rights Commission Act, 2026, which received cabinet approval on August 10, requires a victim or a representative to file a complaint within six months of the violation. The commission may excuse a delay caused by legal or physical incapacity of the victim, intimidation, special circumstances, or in public interest. But this does not necessarily cure the defect; it converts access from a right into a discretion, making the victim explain the delay before the state explains the abuse.
We need to understand that human rights violations are not like consumer disputes. An abuse itself may prevent a timely complaint. A person may be secretly detained, prosecuted in retaliation, threatened by officials, deprived of records, or left physically and psychologically unable to speak. Families of disappeared persons may search police stations, prisons, hospitals and courts for years before learning enough to formulate an allegation. Survivors of torture or sexual violence may remain silent because the state cannot protect them from stigma or reprisals. In such cases, delay or silence is not separate from the violation. Rather, it may be one of its intended consequences.
The draft act compounds the problem through an unexplained distinction. The six-month requirement expressly applies to a complaint submitted by the victim or someone acting on the victim’s behalf. Section 14 also permits the commission to act on information received through the media or another source, but does not attach the same express limit to that route. An old allegation may, therefore, be considered if it becomes a newspaper story, while the victim who personally approaches the commission must first obtain condonation for delay. Public visibility thus becomes a gateway to justice. Those who are poor, remote or politically inconvenient would have to depend on benevolence.
We need not speculate about the consequences, as Nepal has confronted almost the same law. Section 10(5) of Nepal’s National Human Rights Commission Act had imposed a six-month period. At the outset, it was more protective than the Bangladeshi draft, since a person held under another’s control had six months from release or public reappearance. But in Om Prakash Aryal and others v National Human Rights Commission, Nepal’s Supreme Court held that the limit directly curtailed the commission’s constitutionally conferred mandate and declared it void. The court found no constitutional intention to confine victims or the commission to a fixed period when addressing human rights violations. Bangladesh is now proposing a weaker starting rule than the one Nepal’s highest court invalidated.
Other jurisdictions show that a short statutory clock is neither inevitable nor administratively necessary. Section 14 of Sri Lanka’s Human Rights Commission Act authorises investigation on the commission’s own motion or upon a complaint, and contains no express filing period. Malaysia’s Human Rights Commission Act also prescribes no time or age limit for complaints. Its statutory exclusions concern matters pending before, or finally decided by, a court. Kenya’s legislation permits the commission to decline a complaint where another adequate remedy exists or where it is trivial, frivolous, vexatious, or made in bad faith. These laws screen claims by legal substance and institutional suitability, not merely by the date on a calendar.
International law requires precision. It does not establish a single rule that every national human rights institution must hear every complaint forever. The UN-endorsed Paris Principles prescribe a broad mandate but no numerical filing period. More specific standards, however, make a blanket six-month rule extremely difficult to defend. The UN Basic Principles and Guidelines on the Right to a Remedy and Reparation for Victims of Gross Violations of International Human Rights Law and Serious Violations of International Humanitarian Law—while not a treaty—state that time limits governing civil claims and “other procedures” should not be unduly restrictive. They also recognise that, where applicable international obligations require, limitation periods should not apply to gross violations constituting crimes under international law. An NHRC complaint falls naturally within the category of “other procedures”, and six months is exceptionally short for an institution created to address the kind of abuse often committed or concealed by public power.
The position is stronger for torture. In General Comment No 3, the Committee against Torture interprets Article 14 of the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment as requiring access to redress regardless of when the violation occurred, and rejects limitation rules that deprive victims of compensation and rehabilitation. The effects of torture do not obey a legislative timetable. Trauma may delay disclosure, while the harm may intensify with time.
The case of enforced disappearance reveals an additional conceptual failure. Article 8 of the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance directly concerns limitation periods for criminal proceedings, not the admissibility of NHRC complaints. Nevertheless, it expresses a crucial principle: any such period must be long and begin only when the disappearance ceases. A disappearance remains continuing while the person’s fate or whereabouts are concealed. The draft act’s bare phrase, “date of the human rights violation,” offers no rule for an unresolved disappearance, prolonged secret detention, recurring abuse, or a violation discovered only after records emerge. There may be no completed date from which six months can sensibly begin.
Against this backdrop, discretionary waiver is not an adequate answer. It places the initial burden on a traumatised complainant and gives future commissioners broad power without statutory criteria for concealment, delayed discovery, continuing harm, minority, detention, intimidation, or the previous absence of an effective commission. Section 15 already permits dismissal of a prima facie baseless complaint after hearing relevant persons and recording reasons. The draft act, therefore, has a mechanism for filtering weak cases. The six-month rule serves a different function: it filters victims before the evidence is even investigated.
The transitional consequences are also troubling. Section 41 protects proceedings already begun under the repealed law, but does not expressly cover older violations for which no complaint has yet been filed. A new commission should not treat a period of institutional ineffectiveness as time running against victims.
Therefore, when the bill is tabled in parliament, the latter should delete the six-month proviso. If a temporal rule has to be retained, it must not operate as a jurisdictional bar. It should exclude torture, enforced disappearance, extrajudicial killing, sexual violence, gross or systematic abuses, and all continuing or concealed violations. Any time limit should begin only when the violation ends or could reasonably have been discovered, and should be suspended in cases of detention, minority, incapacity, intimidation, concealment, or institutional unavailability. Any refusal to consider a complaint should carry written reasons and an effective right of review.
The draft National Human Rights Commission Act, 2026 has caused concerns for various other reasons, which deserve to be addressed separately and with equal importance. But on the issue of timing at least, we would expect a human rights commission to test the evidence, not reward enforced delay or silence. In a country trying to reckon with years of abuses hidden through fear and state power, the six-month limit is not a proper filing rule. It could instead be used as a legal shelter for impunity.
Barrister Khan Khalid Adnan is advocate of the Supreme Court of Bangladesh, fellow at the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators, and head of the chamber at Khan Saifur Rahman and Associates in Dhaka.
Views expressed in this article are the author's own.
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