Bangladesh: Ensure Accountability For Enforced Disappearances, Provide Reparations For Survivors And Victims’ Families

Dhaka, August 26, 2025

• Government commission into enforced disappearances marks first anniversary

The Bangladesh government must ensure accountability for cases of enforced disappearances during the brutal rule of deposed Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, and provide reparations for victims’ families and survivors, Fortify Rights said today. Tomorrow marks one year since the Bangladesh interim government, headed by Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus, established the Commission of Inquiry on Enforced Disappearances.

“Enforced disappearances were a hallmark of former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s despotic rule, and should never be allowed to happen again in Bangladesh,” said John Quinley, Director at Fortify Rights. “Despite making progress on ensuring accountability during the first year of work of the Commission of Inquiry on Enforced Disappearances, the interim government must do more to address past crimes, including through fair and impartial criminal prosecution of all those involved and reparations for victims and their relatives.”

On August 27, 2024, Bangladesh formed an independent commission to investigate the thousands of disappearances, and in the same month, the government acceded to the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance. The domestic commission has so far received more than 1,800 cases of enforced disappearance, and has reported that hundreds of forcibly disappeared individuals remain missing. In December 2024, the commission published sections of its final report, acknowledging the systematic nature of enforced disappearance, which was "orchestrated by a central command structure” during the rule of the deposed Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina. In June 2025, Bangladesh’s interim government extended the Commission’s mandate until December 2025.

Fortify Rights interviewed 10 survivors and relatives of victims of enforced disappearance, as well as a lawyer supporting victims’ families. Fortify Rights spoke to two survivors who were held in one of many notorious detention centers known in Bangladesh as “Aynaghar,” (meaning “House of Mirrors”), and freed only after the ousting of former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina.

Under the former Awami League government, many of the disappeared were members of rival political parties, including the Bangladesh National Party (BNP) and Jamaat-e-Islami.

Mir Ahmad Bin Quasem, a lawyer also known as Arman, was abducted by plainclothes men who refused to identify themselves from his home in Dhaka in the presence of his wife and child on August 9, 2016. Before his abduction, Arman was part of his father’s legal team at the International Crimes Tribunal, the domestic court used to prosecute atrocity crimes. The court sentenced Arman’s father, Mir Quasem Ali, a prominent leader of the opposition party Jamaat-e-Islami, to death after convicting him of collaborating with the Pakistan military during Bangladesh’s 1971 War of Independence. Arman told Fortify Rights that he believes his father’s trial was politically motivated. His father was executed by the government on September 6, 2016.

After almost nine years in secret, extrajudicial detention Arman was finally dropped off miles from where he was detained by security forces on August 6, 2025, the day after former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina fled the country following a popular revolution. Arman told Fortify Rights about the conditions of his solitary confinement:

In that cell, I could not tell if it was day or night. I was totally cut off from the outside world. The guards would not tell me where I was or what the date was. They wouldn’t even tell me the time. … They used to blindfold me and handcuff me. From midnight to dawn, I was handcuffed with my hands behind me … My cell was eight feet by 10 feet. There were no windows at all. They would run a heavy exhaust fan meant to mask the noise from outside. … It felt worse than death.

Arman was kept handcuffed for so long that he developed skin rashes on his wrists. The guards gave him skin cream, and on the packet it was written “RAB-1.” The Rapid Action Battalion, or RAB, is a notorious specialized police unit that multiple foreign governments have sanctioned for its involvement in extrajudicial killings, torture, and other human rights abuses, documented by Odhikar, Human Rights Watch, and others.

To pursue justice for the victims and survivors of enforced disappearances, Arman recommended that the interim government ensure fair trials for perpetrators which follow international standards and establish a “robust reparations program for the victims.”

Fortify Rights also spoke with families of individuals who remain missing. According to his relatives, Abdul Kader Masum, a BNP activist, was picked up by RAB on December 4, 2013.

Ayesha Ali, Abdul’s mother, told Fortify Rights the last time she heard from her son:

December 16 is my son's birthday. Two days before his birthday, on December 14, I got a call in the middle of the night. On the phone, I could hear my son’s voice. “Ma, how are you?” I could hear in the background, “Ma, they are beating me.” The call lasted 23 seconds and ended. After the phone call, I never heard from him again.

Ayesha continued, “Sometimes, I feel like death would be better than bearing this pain.”

BNP student wing member Kawsar Hossain was abducted in 2013 in Dhaka and also remains missing to date. His daughter, who was three years old at the time of Kawsar’s arrest and is now 15, told Fortify Rights, “I want to hold my father’s hand. I want to call my father Baba [the Bengali word for Dad]. … As his daughter, I deserve the truth.”

Sanjida Islam Tulee, whose brother, Sajedul Islam Sumon, disappeared in 2013, is the co-founder of Maayer Daak, a collective of survivors and victims’ families in Bangladesh working on the cases of the missing and disappeared. She told Fortify Rights:

The pattern over many years is clear. The security forces picked up, detained, tortured, and killed the [political] opposition [activists]. There were many forces involved, all the way to the top. It included RAB, intelligence, and the Army. We want closure for each case of enforced disappearance. ... I believe financial reparations should be included in support given to victims [by the government].

The International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance, to which Bangladesh is a state party, defines the crime of enforced disappearance as:

… the arrest, detention, abduction or any other form of deprivation of liberty by agents of the State or by persons or groups of persons acting with the authorization, support or acquiescence of the State, followed by a refusal to acknowledge the deprivation of liberty or by concealment of the fate or whereabouts of the disappeared person, which place such a person outside the protection of the law.

Article 24 of the Convention demands that state parties take “all appropriate measures to search for, locate and release disappeared persons and, in the event of death, to locate, respect and return their remains.” The same article requires state parties to ensure their laws allow victims of enforced disappearance to have “the right to obtain reparation and prompt, fair and adequate compensation.”

The interim government recently proposed the draft ordinance on Enforced Disappearance Prevention and Redress to create a framework for implementing the International Convention on Enforced Disappearance. The draft ordinance, on file with Fortify Rights, has serious shortcomings, including providing for the death penalty as a sentencing option and allowing trials to be conducted in absentia. The draft ordinance does, however, commit the government to providing “legal aid, rehabilitation, compensation, and assistance to victims and their families” and establish a victim’s fund.

The draft ordinance must include reparations for victims’ families and survivors, but should be amended to exclude capital punishment as a sentencing option and trials in absentia. Donor governments should support Bangladesh in establishing and implementing a reparations fund, Fortify Rights said.

On May 15, 2025, 11 international human rights groups, including Fortify Rights, said in a joint statement that “the ordinance should exclude the death penalty as a sentencing option.”

In February 2025, a U.N. Fact Finding Mission on Bangladesh recommeded the government to continue to provide support and resources to the Commission of Inquiry on Enforced Disappearances, including to “Reveal and close all clandestine places of detention operated by intelligence, paramilitary, police or military forces, and investigate and prosecute identified perpetrators of enforced disappearance, torture and other crimes committed in such places.” The Fact-Finding Mission also recommended that the government ensure “victims have access to effective remedies and reparation.”

In June 2025, the U.N. Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances published a report on Bangladesh in which it recommended implementing “specific measures for the survivors of enforced disappearances,” including access to justice and reparations, including legal and financial support.

“True accountability requires a victim-centered reparations program, fair justice procedures, and unwavering transparency for victims and survivors,” said John Quinley. “Survivors and the relatives of the disappeared cannot wait. Their healing depends not only on prosecutions but on recognition, redress, and the dismantling of abusive security structures that allowed the enforced disappearances to occur on such a widespread and systematic scale."

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