It must be admitted that Bangladesh has, for many years, shown admirable consistency in its treatment of human rights institutions. While other countries burden their human rights watchdog with such heavy and inconvenient instruments as independence, investigative authority, financial autonomy and public trust, we have wisely protected ours from such excesses. The National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), since its birth, has been spared the vulgarity of power. It hasn’t been asked to bite, nor encouraged to bark above a civilised volume. It has, instead, occupied that dignified statutory position reserved for bodies that are to be respected, photographed, occasionally funded, and rarely feared.
This is no small achievement. After all, a human rights commission with actual authority may create several administrative difficulties. It may ask questions. It may visit places without an invitation before everyone has agreed what happened there. It may summon files, officers, explanations, and other items traditionally kept far away from public sunlight. It may even, in a fit of procedural excess, cause discomfort to the state.
Such outcomes must obviously be avoided in the interest of national harmony.
The draft of the National Human Rights Commission Act, 2026, approved by the cabinet on August 10, appears to proceed with admirable caution. It recognises that the commission must be independent, but not so independent that it becomes actually independent.
Surely, this is a mature approach.
The current government repealed the 2025 ordinance issued by the interim administration on the promise, or at least the premise, that a stronger and better law would follow. The 2026 draft law is, apparently, that law. This creates some difficulty for those of us still attached to the ordinary meaning of words. For in most respects that matter, the draft law doesn’t strengthen the commission. It retreats from the 2025 ordinance on independence, appointments, pluralism, financial autonomy and investigative authority. More impressively, in some areas, it retreats even from the 2009 act, under which Bangladesh’s NHRC never rose beyond Status B in international accreditation. One might call this progress, provided one is willing to define progress as walking backwards with a confident face.
Let’s begin with the most revealing provision of the proposed draft: allegations against disciplined forces. The commission has, once again, been spared the indignity of investigating security forces independently. Instead, it will return the allegation to the accused force, allowing the institution under scrutiny to become the first author of the truth about itself. We already know from decades of experience what happens when an ordinary citizen is forced to seek remedy from the very architecture that produced, enabled or concealed the violence: a big fat nothing with official stamps on it.
The draft 2026 law appears to understand this perfectly, hence avoids the ridiculous possibility of subverting the status quo.
This is a splendid arrangement—if the purpose of accountability is to preserve the feelings of the accused.
The 2025 ordinance expressly stated that the commission would not fall under any ministry or division. The draft 2026 law describes the commission as independent but deletes the explicit protection against ministerial subordination. Independence is thus retained as a description, while its legal shelter is quietly shown the door.
The old anxiety that commissioners might be selected through a process too distant from the executive has also been wisely addressed. The political branches now hover close enough to the doorway to ensure that no one excessively independent wanders in by accident. The selection committee is to be chaired by the Speaker of the House, with government figures occupying five of the nine seats. For each post, the committee is to send two names to the president, whose final choice is circumscribed by a constitutional arrangement where the prime minister’s advice carries the day.
By the time the final appointment is made, independence has been so thoroughly introduced to its benefactors that one can hardly expect it to behave rudely later.
Under the 2025 ordinance, the government had to consider the commission’s own budget proposal. The draft 2026 law removes even that modest requirement. An institution expected to scrutinise the executive is thus invited to depend on the executive’s generosity, which is a charming arrangement if one believes watchdogs should first apply for lunch money.
Pluralism, meanwhile, is converted from guarantee into suggestion. The 2025 ordinance required the commission to include a member of an ethnic community. The draft 2026 law merely asks that such candidates be given consideration, if found qualified. A commission may therefore now be lawfully formed with no member from any ethnic or disadvantaged minority community. This is unfortunate only if one thinks that communities most likely to experience state violence, land dispossession, discrimination, and distrust of public institutions should have a guaranteed voice inside the national body established to protect rights.
The poor, meanwhile, are offered the most elegant right of all: the right to proceed without the means to proceed. The 2009 act makes legal assistance to complainants one of the commission’s functions and allows the commission to take a proven victim to the High Court. The 2025 Ordinance went further by creating a Legal Action Branch and a panel of experienced lawyers. The draft 2026 law keeps neither the function nor the machinery. Legal assistance survives only as a possible use of the Commission’s Fund.
We should not underestimate the administrative convenience of this design. Rights are least disruptive when the people who need them cannot afford to activate them.
The 2009 act allows the NHRC to open offices at divisional, district and upazila levels as needed. The 2025 ordinance guaranteed divisional office, with district and upazila offices if necessary. The draft 2026 law, with admirable sensitivity to administrative order, requires government approval before the commission can open offices outside Dhaka. A landless woman, an Indigenous community, a worker or a family seeking answers after custodial abuse may still approach the commission, naturally, after first conquering distance, cost, fear, paperwork and the small matter of geography.
The 2026 draft law also trims the commission’s mandate with impressive confidence. Gone are the broader powers to scrutinise proposed laws before they are passed, to adequately train law enforcement agencies, to ask why the same violations keep returning like badly behaved relatives, and to do whatever else may be necessary when human rights abuse refuses, inconsiderately, to fit into a pre-approved box.
A human rights commission requires flexibility because violations are flexible. The draft 2026 law, however, appears to prefer a commission less adaptable than the violations it must confront.
The weakness of the draft law does not lie in a few unfortunate clauses that may be tidied up later. The deeper problem is that it misunderstands, or perhaps understands too well, the purpose of a national human rights organisation. One does not summon such a body into existence because the state is in the habit of behaving well. One does so because, from time to time, the state misplaces its manners, its records, its detainees, and occasionally its conscience.
A party that so recently stood at the receiving end of repression might have been expected to draw a lesson or two from history. It appears, instead, to have drawn the wrong ones. Having known what it means for institutions to be captured, it now seems content to preserve the commission as another decorative object in the national architecture of reform: polished, funded just enough, empowered just enough, independent just enough, and placed exactly where it can do the least harm to power.
And the republic may once again congratulate itself for strengthening human rights without troubling those who violate them.
Views expressed in this article are the author's own.
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