Great. Thank you very much.
Good afternoon, and thank you very much for the opportunity to provide a statement to you, in connection with your study on women as human rights defenders, which is sorely needed, I think, at this point.
My statement is based on my experiences with the Bangladesh Legal Aid and Services Trust. I'll try to focus on the risks faced by women human rights defenders in the course of seeking, or trying to secure for others, access to justice, and how they are affected particularly in relation to the intersections with ethnicity, sexuality, language and disability, amongst others.
As you heard, I am a lawyer in private practice, and I serve pro bono with BLAST. I won't speak about my personal circumstances now, but just about our experiences, and the experiences of both colleagues and clients who are women human rights defenders.
Before I discuss our key concerns, let me speak for a moment about our work in BLAST. We are an unusual organization, and were set up following a resolution of the Bangladesh Bar Council, the professional regulatory body, as part of its commitment to providing legal aid for the indigent and those from marginalized communities. We were set up at a time when Bangladesh was emerging from military rule into a period of elected government.
We work, right now, after 25 years, across all 64 districts of the country, and we are locally managed by the bar association in each district. We have about 500 staff and about 2,500 panel lawyers, a pro bono lawyers network. We now work increasingly with community organizations and the universities through legal clinics and community law clinics.
Our legal services involve community awareness programs on rights, remedies and services. Our litigation focuses on individual litigation, primarily on family law, but also on land, labour and criminal defence, as well as constitutional rights. We also do strategic litigation around discriminatory or arbitrary laws, policies and actions.
We have been deeply involved in condemning impunity for violence against women, and in particular, issues of child marriage, domestic violence and rape. We have taken up cases of violence against women and girls from marginalized communities. Some of our landmark equality litigation includes cases challenging so-called fatwa violence, forced veiling, discrimination by the police in recording rape complaints by women from indigenous communities, the recent prohibition of the so-called two finger test—a medico-legal procedure—as well as challenges to disability-based discrimination in public employment.
From our perspective, women human rights defenders are women working on many rights and for many communities. These include, for example, civil and critical rights, alleged disappearances, extradition killings or torture of family members; freedom of expression and association, particularly for labour rights activists; economic and social rights around rights to housing and resisting forced evictions; and the right to education and health. We also include women working with different communities where there are indigenous people, sexual minorities, people with disabilities or Dalits.
I'd like to start by setting out a couple of emblematic cases, which I hope will illustrate our key concerns regarding a situation faced by women human rights defenders.
One of these cases is that of Kalpana Chakma, from the Chittagong Hill Tracts, an area in the southeast of Bangladesh which, until recently, was predominantly inhabited by indigenous peoples. Kalpana was a woman human rights defender, a leader of the Hill Women's Federation and a well-known activist in women's rights. She was allegedly abducted from her home in 1996. Now, more than 20 years later, the case remains under investigation. A third investigation has begun, and sees no sign of ending. It is a clear, demonstrable example of total impunity, in a particularly egregious case, and it's had a very chilling effect on women activists in that region, as well as across the country.
There is also the case Rizwana Hasan, a fellow lawyer and the leader of the Bangladesh Environmental Lawyers Association, who conducted landmark litigation herself around environmental rights and justice. A few years ago, Rizwana faced a situation in which her husband was abducted. He was found only after she made public appeals, including to the prime minister, for his recovery. Again, this is a case that has sent chills through the spines of many of us.
Let me cut to a more recent case, not of a very high profile person, like Kalpana or Rizwana, but of an everyday, ordinary school teacher. A young woman, a school teacher in a remote district town, became a client of ours last year. When she was six months pregnant, she was arrested at about 1 a.m. from her home, while sleeping with her husband and five-year-old son. The police claimed that she had made a Facebook post in support of the school students' movement on road safety. She was held overnight in a police station and for several weeks in a local jail where there were no hospital facilities available for women. She was refused bail by the trial court and then by the appeal court. Ultimately, we only got bail for her in the high court after we were able to show her medical certificate showing the extent of her pregnancy and where no counterclaim could be made from the attorney general's office, even though they were trying to resist her release from prison at that point.
Let me tell you about a few cases of everyday threats and everyday risks that are faced by women human rights defenders. As I said, we consider not only lawyers but others to be human rights defenders, anyone standing up for the protection and promotion of human rights.
Our front-line colleagues, our paralegals, face particular risks. Particularly those who work in urban informal settlements in low-income communities have spoken about many situations, often daily situations, in which community leaders, particularly those who are elderly and influential, have threatened them and tried to stop them from providing support to women and children who are survivors of violence.
In one case, for example, involving sexual violence against a child, one of our women paralegals was trying to stand by that child and her family in the situation. She found herself encircled inside this dense informal settlement and, afraid that she might be hurt physically, she had to retreat and couldn't in the end pursue the case at all.
We also find from women paralegals that they face many threats that are simply not even considered to be relevant by their male counterparts. For example, they can't work in these areas after dusk; there's too much risk of physical assault. They also face, even in broad daylight, continuous commentary about themselves—about their clothing, their appearance, about just the fact that they're going into homes—and they're often accused of breaking up families or trying to disrupt the peace.
They're often accused about why they don't have families themselves. They're interrogated about their own personal situations: whether they're married; if they're not married, why they're not married; how many children they have and so on. They are generally made to feel that their marital state is more relevant than their capacities and abilities to work.
Many also face cyber-threats. Both men and women face these, but women particularly face cyber-threats again in relation to their sexuality, their behaviour and their dress.
In the case of human rights defenders who are transgender, from the hijra community, we have colleagues who work around trying to espouse and promote the rights of the hijra community, given recent high-level government recognition of the community. They face particular, threefold threats: first, threats from other hijra groups, with whom they may have rivalry; second, from leaders of the hijra community; and third, from the police, who often don't accept or are unwilling to take in their complaints if they go to police stations to register complaints regarding violence from within the community.
As for women human rights defenders who work on LGBT rights, the threat of violence is particularly severe, irrespective of whether they are members of the community themselves. This is because there are very few safe spaces to talk about LGBT issues. We still, like much of the post-colonial world, live with this famous or infamous section 377 of our Penal Code, which effectively criminalizes same-sex relationships.
The murders of two prominent LGBT rights activists in 2016 shook the movement to its core. It's an emerging movement in Bangladesh in the last 10 years, but it's been very severely pushed back by this incident in 2016. The response of state authorities after that, who have, of course, acknowledged that they're continuing the investigations but at the same time have issued public condemnations of same-sex relationships and asserted both nationally and internationally that such relationships are “against Bangladesh culture”, has again been a situation that has created further fear and anxiety in the community, such that it can't express itself, can't come forward, can't claim its rights under the law, because the law itself is criminalizing.
I want to talk very quickly about our own organization issues. BLAST is a leading organization campaigning for compliance with the Supreme Court judgment mandating the establishment of investigatory mechanisms on sexual harassment by all public and private bodies. We frequently train organizations around the country, and yet we face the situation that women colleagues, all trained or practising lawyers and working at our head office, face serial sexual harassment from a young male colleague, also a lawyer. All of the women unfortunately remained silent about their experiences for weeks on end. Ultimately we found out they were afraid that if they spoke out, they would be stigmatized, because most of them were single women, unmarried or divorced.
This incident illustrated well for us how women human rights defenders are impacted upon by prevailing social norms and attitudes, including moral judgments based on sexuality and the enormous emphasis on marriage as a mark of respectability and worth. It also illustrated in the end how mobilizing, by women and by men in their support, can result in change.
In this case, the silence that had continued for so many weeks broke after one of the young women involved finally spoke to an older woman colleague, who incidentally sits on our own sexual harassment complaints committee. The older colleague then reported the matter to human resources and then to a male board member, a well-known leader of the bar, nationally.
We were able to finally take steps in an investigation and action against the offending lawyer, and then we took further systematic action. We printed posters and information communication materials, overhauled our internal audit policies, provided training to staff and started reporting to our board in compliance. We're now advocating with the bar associations around the country, as well as the bar council, to adopt these Supreme Court guidelines, so that we can see more systemic change happening.
