Diary of a lawmaker: Laws for rights and the unmaking of them

There are moments in a parliamentary career that one anticipates: the first speech, the first bill, the first vote. And then there are moments no one prepares you for. Mine came when I rose on a point of order to ask how a House full of victims could bury the very law meant to protect victims—and found myself choking on my own words.

Let me start from the beginning.

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In 2025, the interim government did something this country had never done before: in consultation with many local experts and with the direct involvement of the United Nations and the international community, it drafted a legal framework against enforced disappearance that was compliant with Bangladesh’s obligations under the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance—a convention we had only freshly ratified. The framework was not perfect, but it had teeth. It empowered an independent body to enter any place of detention, anywhere in the country, without prior notice. It could investigate any abuse, by any individual or any security force, without exception and without permission.

The expectation—mine, and I believe the nation’s—was that a democratically elected government would inherit the institutions and strengthen them further. That is what mandates are for.

Instead, to our utter shock, the ordinances related to enforced disappearance and the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) were allowed to lapse.

I made my appeal on the floor under a point of order. I confess I did not deliver it with the composure expected of a barrister. I choked; there were tears. Because the question I was asking was not rhetorical. How can this parliament—in which many members are victims of the ousted regime themselves, the prime minister was tortured, and the home minister was enforced-disappeared and driven into exile—scrap such a law? I spent eight years of my own life inside a secret prison. I did not imagine I would live to see the safeguards against that darkness dismantled by some of the very people who had survived it. Looking across the aisle, I saw government members wiping their eyes. They knew. Everyone in that chamber knew.

The law minister once assured the House that a bigger and better law was coming. In the Business Advisory Committee, we were assured that each of the lapsing ordinances (issued during the interim time) would be allowed detailed discussion. That assurance was later withdrawn on grounds of time constraints. The law minister, pointing to me by name on the floor, promised that I would be part of the consultation for the new draft.

Here is what that consultation looked like. The ministry held one small session. I knocked on the law ministry’s door repeatedly, formally and informally, asking to be involved as promised. I was ignored. A narrow window was opened for the public to send suggestions by email; how many wrote in, and what they said, was never made public. That was the sum total of the process that replaced the consultation of local experts and the United Nations.

And then came the draft itself, and with it a wave of criticism from every stakeholder: rights groups, victims’ families, and the legal community. The criticism is deserved. Consider what the proposed framework actually says. Under the NHRC bill, a complaint against a security force must first be referred to that very force; the institution to be investigated authorises and then conducts its own investigation, on a voluntary basis, with no deadline, producing a recommendation that binds no one. Under the enforced disappearance bill, complaints go to the police—the same police who, when over 1,500 complaints were brought before the commission on disappearances, had refused in most cases to even record a general diary—and the officer investigating the allegations of crimes committed by elite forces may be a sub-inspector, the junior-most rank of investigator. Most alarming of all, a complainant who fails to prove the allegation faces up to five years’ rigorous imprisonment. A mother whose son was taken from her home in the middle of the night, with no witnesses the state will acknowledge, must now weigh her demand for truth against the risk of prison.

I keep returning to one constitutional question, and I ask it as a lawyer, not a partisan: why should a victim’s protection under the law depend on who victimised them? Articles 27 and 31 of the constitution promise every citizen equal protection. A citizen disappeared by a private gang and a citizen disappeared by men in uniform have suffered the same crime. The proposed law treats them as though they have not.

The opposition’s reading of all this is now unambiguous: a ruling party commanding a two-thirds majority appears possessed by the same evil that created this monster under the ousted regime. We are convinced of the government’s mala fide intent: to preserve the ability to abuse the security apparatus in order to consolidate power. That is why the opposition walked out, because taking part in the passage of a mala fide law would only lend it legitimacy. The government’s abandonment of its referendum commitment only deepens that conviction. What happens next is sadly predictable: since the Standing Committee on the Home Ministry has rubber-stamped the bill, with the ruling party having an absolute majority and with Article 70 (which strips a member of his seat for voting against the party line) remaining in effect, this travesty will be made into law.

These are not the growing pains of a young democracy. These are grave and disturbing symptoms: of abuse and plunder returning through the front door, of political space shrinking, of rights eroding—the very principles for which so many of our young people gave up their lives. They did not die so that the machinery of disappearance could be repainted and re-licensed.

I write this diary entry not as an adviser or a barrister but as one lawmaker asking a question I cannot escape. If this law passes over our objections, over the tears of a chamber of victims, over the graves of the July martyrs, how will I, as a lawmaker, be able to live with myself?

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Barrister Mir Ahmad Bin Quasem (Arman) is a member of parliament for Dhaka-14, adviser on foreign affairs to the leader of the opposition, and a survivor of enforced disappearance (2016-2024). He is the author of the memoir ‘Aynaghar er shakkhi: Goom jiboner aat bochhor.’

Views expressed in this article are the author's own. 

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