What good will abolishing Rab do if its machinery is not dismantled?

The Rapid Action Battalion (Rab) has long been the subject of serious controversy because of its involvement in enforced disappearances, extrajudicial killings, torture in secret detention facilities, and other grave human rights violations during the Awami League government’s tenure. Understandably, there is widespread public support for abolishing Rab. In its final report, titled Unfolding the Truth: A Structural Diagnosis of Enforced Disappearance in Bangladesh, the Commission of Inquiry on Enforced Disappearances also recommended dismantling Rab stating that it “has been at the centre of the system of enforced disappearance, torture, and extrajudicial killing described in this report.”

It’s worth recalling that the United States imposed sanctions on the force even during the Awami League’s tenure, in 2021. Later, following the 2024 uprising, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), which conducted an independent fact-finding investigation into human rights violations and abuses related to the uprising, recommended Rab’s dissolution in its report.

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Against this backdrop, the introduction in parliament on September 3 of the Special Response Battalion Bill, 2026, which proposes to abolish the Rab, should have been encouraging. Sadly, it is not. Although the bill provides for Rab’s abolition, in substance, it does little more than change the force’s name, leaving its fundamental structure, powers, and functions intact. The bill intends to create a new elite force called the Special Response Battalion (SRB) to replace Rab. Following its introduction in parliament, the bill has been sent to the Parliamentary Standing Committee on the Ministry of Home Affairs for review. The committee has been asked to submit its report within four working days.

Under the proposed law, SRB would take over Rab in its entirety, including its powers and functions, existing resources and institutional structure, byelaws and orders, manpower, funds, bank deposits, assets, liabilities, contracts, registers, and records. Until new rules are introduced, Rab’s existing 2005 rules on disciplinary action and court proceedings would apply to the SRB. It would operate as a specialised unit within the police force. Importantly, its members could include police officers, personnel from other disciplined forces, and designated members of the armed forces or government employees. They could join through direct appointment or deputation.

SRB would have its own flag, emblem, and uniform. It would be headed by a director general holding the rank of additional inspector general of police or above. The force would have broad law enforcement powers, including investigating criminal offences and carrying out searches, arrests, and seizures. It would also have its own lock-up and interrogation facilities. To address complaints, the bill proposes a grievance redress committee. The committee would handle complaints from members of the public as well as internal grievances involving SRB personnel.

We may recall that in addition to its recommendation to disband Rab, the UN report had recommended that members of the armed forces be assigned to internal security tasks only in the most exceptional circumstances and for a limited period, subject to parliamentary approval, under the command of civilian law enforcement authorities, and with full transparency to the public regarding their tasks and rules of engagement. It had also recommended confining the functions of BGB and DGFI strictly to border security and military intelligence, respectively. The rationale is clear—the involvement of members of armed forces in internal security, law and order, and combating crime by posting them to forces such as Rab, or the newly proposed SRB, significantly increases the risk of serious human rights abuses.

The SRB bill is inconsistent with these recommendations. As stated before, like Rab, SRB can include members of the armed forces, and with all the legal, institutional, and jurisdictional structures intact—including the same human resources drawn from both the police and other disciplined forces—it is indeed the same force as Rab, except with a new name and possibly a new uniform. That it will operate within the same proven legal ecosystem of unaccountability and impunity as Rab is indeed alarming. A law does not operate in a vacuum; it operates within a system comprising the entire legal architecture. Sadly, that system may again remain ineffective in preventing the very abuses that led to the calls for Rab’s abolition in the first place.

Notable in this regard are the National Human Rights Commission Bill, 2026 and the Enforced Disappearance Prevention and Redress Bill, 2026, both of which have now been passed in parliament, amid walkouts by the opposition as well as protests by rights defenders and victims of past abuses. The passage of these bills clears the way for an entirely toothless National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) while putting in place an utterly inadequate legal framework for the prevention of enforced disappearance.

The problems with the new NHRC law have been discussed at length elsewhere. Just to give a brief summary here, the new NHRC will not be an independent body. The government will control the appointment of its members and, instead of allowing impartial and competent human rights defenders to be appointed, will be able to appoint partisan individuals. Once appointed, the government will be able to control its operations in many ways, including by appointing personnel and controlling its budget. Most importantly for our present context, the NHRC will not be able to carry out direct and independent investigations into human rights violations by security and disciplined forces, such as the SRB.

Likewise, the just-passed enforced disappearance law takes away the authority of the NHRC to investigate cases of enforced disappearance—an authority vested in it by the predecessor ordinance, which was later repealed. Instead, it provides for allegations of enforced disappearance by one state agency to be investigated by another state agency or by an inter‑agency investigation team, excluding the accused agency. This creates three major problems. First, an investigation by one state agency into another is unlikely to be independent. Second, in many cases it may not be possible to determine which agency was involved in an enforced disappearance in the first place. It would, therefore, also not be possible to identify an agency other than the one involved for conducting the investigation. Third, because the law provides for one agency to investigate another, each agency, fearing embarrassment, could claim that it is not the appropriate one to conduct the investigation, thus causing uncertainty and a loss of valuable time.

Clearly, the ecosystem in which SRB will operate is not one capable of preventing the kind of rights abuses that led to the call for dissolving Rab. The government tells us that it has good intentions and that, therefore, people should not be concerned about the law. But if good intentions alone were enough, no nation would have designed its law enforcement institutions with human rights protections at their core, or created institutions of accountability to keep state power in check. In light of the grave human cost of enforced disappearances, torture, extrajudicial killings, and other abuses, it is only natural to hope that the lessons of these violations will be heeded and that all three laws discussed in this article will be appropriately revised.

Dr Sharif Bhuiyan is former visiting fellow at the University of Cambridge and senior advocate at the Supreme Court of Bangladesh. He was also a member of the Constitution Reform Commission. 

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

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