SINCE the Bangladesh Awami League Party led by Sheikh Hasina won a landslide victory in the 2008 elections, citizens of Bangladesh have been increasingly crushed under the heel of a despotic, brutal regime that offers democracy in name only — beatings, torture and the persecution of political opponents are all common occurrences.

Amnesty International highlighted the issue in a 2020 report, calling for urgent action — yet Western leaders, including those in the EU and Britain, continue to remain silent.

Bangladesh has known democracy before — previous leaders established a free press, an unbiased judiciary and fair elections.

Now elections are rigged, courts are biased and human rights activists are persecuted, incarcerated on trumped-up charges, disappeared and murdered.

While leaders like Boris Johnson display enthusiasm for interference in Ukraine and continue to eye China as a geostrategic threat, the urgent, non-military intervention that could help countries like Bangladesh, appears to be eschewed.

Though a handful of sanctions have been levied against individuals in the Bangladesh Rapid Action Battalion (RAB), which is accused of involvement in the extrajudicial killings of over 600 citizens, little else has been done to pressure a regime that’s eroding human rights daily.

The corruption is extensive: the 2021 Al Jazeera documentary, All the President’s Men, exposed the links between a powerful mafia, the current Hasina and the then-head of the nation’s army.

An Al Jazeera investigative unit discovered that the sitting government purchased Israeli-made surveillance equipment to spy on its citizens in 2018 while Bangladesh military personnel were trained in Hungary by Israeli intelligence leaders, despite Bangladesh not officially recognising Israel as a nation.

Bangladeshi authorities continue to deny the enforced disappearances of political dissenters and refuse to address extrajudicial killings carried out by the government’s agents, including the police.

At a 2021 briefing held by the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission, representatives of the Bangladesh government refuted all allegations of extrajudicial torture, murder and political suppression.

They further disputed the findings of a Human Rights Watch report detailing a string of enforced disappearances that have occurred under the current ruling party.

The nation’s press has also been effectively stifled. In February 2021, writer Mustaq Ahmed died in pre-trial detention, detained for posting criticism of the government’s pandemic response on social media.

Cartoonist Ahmed Kabir Kishore, who was jailed for a similar “offence” claimed he’d been tortured in custody and gave details of the brutalisation of his compatriot, Mustaq Ahmed.

As of September 2021 at least 80 journalists have been attacked, wounded or killed performing their jobs, while authorities abuse the country’s Orwellian Digital Security Act (DSA), jailing citizens who express dissenting views.

UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet called for an urgent overhaul of the DSA in March 2021 — the Bangladesh government responded by expanding the number of tribunals dealing with DSA related “crimes.”

Though the country is a signatory to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as well as the 1984 UN Convention Against Torture, state-sponsored killings, enforced disappearances and the incarceration and brutalisation of those who criticise the government happen with alarming regularity.

Western leaders are now duty-bound to act on the pretensions to concern they’ve been mouthing, not least because of enormous profits gained from Bangladesh’s garment industry, which accounts for $20 billion and €15bn in annual exports to the US and Europe.

Tesco, H&M, Primark, Wal-Mart and many other mega-corporations depend on the cheap clothing produced in the nation’s factories.

Many garment industry workers subsist on poverty wages driven down by Western CEOs’ need to slash their expenditure — and are forced to work in highly unsafe conditions. 

Numerous disasters, replete with fatalities, have occurred within Bangladesh’s clothing factories, including the 2013 Dhaka collapse and the notorious Rana Plaza catastrophe of 2014.

Bangladesh is the second-largest garment supplier in the world after China, but though the nation is set to graduate out of Least Developed Country Status due to key socio-economic indicators, human rights within the nation lie in shreds.

These rights are enshrined as fundamental under Part III of the constitution of Bangladesh, yet those with the power to levy political sanctions on the ruling regime still largely avert their eyes.

Multiple human rights watchdogs have sounded the alarm about the torture, killing and oppression of residents and refugees, as well as the rigging of elections.

The December 2018 election saw extensive voter suppression, aggressive policing, systemic arrests and the detention of opposition activists.

There is an active open UN investigation looking into the disappearance of 86 citizens, while others who have vanished have subsequently turned up dead, with no apparent explanation.

Without leveraging the tools it has at its disposal to secure democracy and human rights within Bangladesh, the international political community makes a mockery of the principles it claims to uphold.

It also exposes its hypocrisy — targeting nations that threaten the dominance of the West, while turning a blind eye to virulent human rights abuses in Bangladesh, as Western capitalists profit from the exports the country produces.