Good morning.
Thank you so very much to all the members of the subcommittee for their recognition of our work at BLAST. We're all really honoured by this and I want to thank you very much.
I'm just one of 2,500 or more lawyers practising across the country in Bangladesh who are part of the pro bono network at BLAST. Together with our staff lawyers and paralegals, we provide advice, legal representation, alternative dispute resolution and strategic litigation, primarily focused on ensuring access to justice for poor and marginalized groups. We also undertake research and advocacy to identify and challenge discriminatory laws and practices and to try to ensure greater responsiveness within our justice system for those who are most in need. We work often in alliance with other rights organizations, particularly working on access to justice for workers, women and children who are survivors of violence, and for those who face discrimination due to ethnicity, religion, belief, gender identity or disability, amongst others.
In many cases we work alongside the government, complementing the government's legal aid program, providing advice to indigent prisoners, while supporting initiatives such as activating village courts that deal with petty claims. These kinds of initiatives really deal with the diversion of cases away from our very clogged-up courts and our justice system. In addition, our front-line services, which are provided by paralegals and persons over telephone hotlines using mobile apps or through our mobile legal clinics will have a different function as well, a more important one than just diversion, which is informing people about their rights and even more importantly the possibility of remedy and how and where to secure it. We provide these services right across the country, to Bangladeshis in villages and in our cities, and also now to Rohingya women and children and to the broader community in the camps in Cox's Bazar, who have fled atrocities in Myanmar.
In our 25 years of service, I think, as you mentioned, it's very important we're speaking today on the anniversary of D-Day. For us in Bangladesh, a more recent anniversary is that of our own independence war in 1971. That memory, and the memories of many of those who were involved in setting up our organization, their own experience of the sacrifice and the violations they suffered there, have really been what has animated our work since as well.
In the 25 years that we have been working, and the almost 50 years now that Bangladesh has been alive as a nation, we have won many significant victories and we have moved forward. If we just look at our own work at BLAST, we've seen that, through ensuring timely advice and timely legal intervention, we've made real changes in people's lives. For example, for women we've won custody disputes. We've stopped child marriages. We've ensured maintenance payments, which allow women to carry on with their lives. We've won fights for workers, winning compensation after workplace deaths and injuries, getting arrears of wages. Through strategic litigation we've also won victories, striking down the mandatory death penalty; holding extrajudicial penalties, mostly on women, by informal justice bodies to constitute violations of the right to gender equality; prohibiting beating of children in schools; imposing restrictions on police abuse of power in cases of arrest without warrant.
We have challenges ongoing. We're supporting a visually impaired lawyer, for example, now to challenge, through constitutional petitions, rules that still prohibit today, in 2019, disabled people from joining the judiciary or the civil service. We're still fighting, six years after the event, for compensation for the workers and the families of those who died in the Rana Plaza building collapse disaster.
However, beyond these individual cases, we find there are many challenges, more structural challenges, that are still before us. When we started out 25 years ago, the world was a much more hopeful place. Many of you might remember that at the Vienna conference on human rights many of us activists and human rights defenders made the call that women's rights are human rights. In today's world that seems more relevant than ever. At the same time, when we're seeing populists and autocrats all around the world, not only in our part of it, seeking to curtail rights and suppress or silence voices of difference and dissent, and we're also seeing extremists threatening the world with messages of hate and intolerance, seeking to divide people based on religion and race, it seems even more important for us, as rights defenders, to speak up for the rights of all, to speak up on the message of universality.
I think for us, from our perspective, we feel it's critical to defend and to fight for independent institutions, to secure people's right to vote, to an independent judiciary, to a free press, to resist politicization and capture of law-enforcing agencies and abusive, repressive laws to police dissent.
In addition to all of the achievements and victories, we are now facing a number of challenges. We see the structures that we have relied on—and really our premise has been to strengthen these structures—being threatened and facing fundamental attacks on their integrity. We see now that many victims of violations, the kinds of violations we hadn't imagined 25 years ago, such as disappearances and ex-judicial executions, simply aren't able to approach organizations that would provide them with remedies to articulate their needs or to make the required claims. The fear is too great. The terror is too much. They can't confront it and we can't stand by them.
This time, the challenges that we have to confront are in being able to speak up, to articulate claims for justice, to find the avenues and pathways to be able to make demands, and to confront repressive laws made in the name of protecting people, protecting our rights.
When I last had the privilege to speak to your committee a few months ago, I spoke about a couple of individual cases. One was about Kalpana Chakma, who disappeared in 1996, more than 23 years ago. In a few weeks, we will be going to court again to ask again for an investigation of her case, of the allegations about her disappearance. We still have no answers.
Last year, I spoke to you about a schoolteacher who had been arrested and held in detention for several weeks simply because she spoke up on behalf of student protesters— schoolchildren—who were demanding the right to go safely to school without being mowed down by speeding trucks and buses that nobody holds accountable for road safety violations. That woman was imprisoned last year. She's out now, but in the few months since I last spoke to you, I've heard that she's actually going to be taken. She's actually being charged with committing an offence under the information and communications technology act.
These kinds of challenges remain. These fundamentally repressive laws are not being used against people who are violating laws but against people who are trying to speak up to ensure justice for others. These are people who have been at the forefront as defenders of rights, defenders of women and defenders of men. They are trying to make our country a safer and better place.
I want to close by again thanking all of you very much for recognizing our work. Thank you particularly for recognizing our day-to-day work and the stuff that is often unsung, as you said, to ensure that you can stand by people so they can make sure their daily lives can be continued.
We want to thank you also for giving us the chance to speak about the things that we often are not able to speak about any longer. Thank you, again. We hope that you will stay with us as we go forward with our work.