One year ago on March 12, a woman named Shahin Sultana Santa was beaten and tortured by police in Dhaka while she was waiting for her son outside the boys school near Road number 27 of the Dhanmondi Residential Area in the capital of Bangladesh. She was beaten so badly that she suffered fractures on her hand and sustained serious injuries to her body that were so grave that she suffered a miscarriage.
The brutal incident occurred amidst a government backed order to deploy the Dhaka Metropolitan Police (DMP) to stop the “Election Commission Secretariat blockade”, a campaign that was organised by opposition political parties. The event saw police and opposition members engage in a violent clash that resulted in many civilians being randomly targeted and beaten, including the victim Mrs. Santa.
Mrs. Santa then began a brave crusade to fight for justice and to expose her perpetrators. As a daughter of a former High Court Judge and a wife of a practicing lawyer of the Supreme Court, courtrooms and legal battles were nothing new for her.
However, when Mrs. Santa went to the Mohammadpur police station to lodge her compliant, the officers refused to record the information several times. At last, on March 14 and 19 she lodged two cases with the Chief Metropolitan Magistrate’s (CMM) Court of Dhaka. The Court directed the Inspector General of Police (IGP) and the CMM to arrange an investigation into the respective cases. Not surprisingly, the police answered by lodging fabricated charges against the victim and her husband, by finding an anonymous source to lodge a complaint of theft and vandalism involving a car.
Mrs. Santa and her husband then went and filed a complaint with the High Court Division who then directed the police not to harass the family by lodging any fabricated charge or to enter their home without a warrant. The High Division Bench also issued a Rule Nisi upon the Government, including the Home Secretary, IGP, Commissioner of the DMP and other officers, as to demand why the police believe that they should not be held accountable for the brutality and why their actions should not be heard in a court of law. Regrettably, the directions of the High Court were ignored by the police and other authorities.
As a consequence, Mrs. Santa, her family and the witnesses in the cases have lived in fear for over the past year and have experienced continuous death threats. They have had fabricated charges lodged against them. They have been intimidated and harassed. Also, both the police and magistrate have submitted farcical investigation reports regarding her cases. All this has resulted in the Women and Children Special Tribunal No. 4, discharging Mrs Santa’s case on the basis of “not having proof of the sections of Women and Children Repression Prevention Act-2003” However, the tribunal has not dismissed the case involving fabricated charges. This ruling was highlighted in the judicial probe report even though the same document asserted that “the offence is cognizable under the Penal Code”.
Today, after over one year of struggle, the authorities of Bangladesh have utterly failed to take a single initiative in delivering justice to the victim. National and international human rights organisations, including the Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) and its sister organisation, the Asian Legal Resource Centre (ALRC) have requested numerous times that the Bangladeshi authorities investigate this case thoroughly and take action against the alleged perpetrators (For further details, please see: Special Report: Lawless law-enforcement and the parody of judiciary in Bangladesh, Vol. 5, No. 4, August 2006, page: 63, case # 16). Instead the Government has promoted the alleged perpetrators, including the then Deputy Commissioner (DC) of the South Zone of the DMP, Mr. Mazharul Haque; and the DC of the West Zone, Mr. Kohinur Mian.
Both men are still serving within the police and have greater authority than ever before. They have been given a carte blanche to policing power and they use it indiscriminately. For instance on 12 March 2007, Mrs. Santa went to the CMM Court to seek bail from a charge of violence (GR Case # 75 of the Dhanmondi police station, dated 12 March 2006, under section 143.427, 435 and 325 of the Penal Code) following a raid on her house on 11 March 2007 by the Adabor police of the DMP. As soon as Mrs. Santa received bail, a lawyer informed her that she has been charged with another case of violence by the Dhanmondi police station, under the direction of the two deputy commissioners. An arrest warrant has also been issued by the Court against her although her name was not included in the First Information Report (FIR). She now may be arrested over a charge dating back over one year that she, and her husband new nothing about. This is nothing more than police harassment.
This legal travesty demonstrates how Bangladesh Police and legal institutions in the country operate. Mrs. Santa is just one of thousands of torture victims in Bangladesh who have been abused and silenced by the law-enforcement agencies. It is unclear when Bangladesh will end its culture of impunity. The AHRC is left in total disarray when it comes to justice in Bangladesh, while the caretaker government has not shown any progress in combating the country’s grave human rights concerns. The AHRC is tremendously concerned that torture victims such as Shahin Sultana Santa have had their hopes for justice totally destroyed by government authorities who continue to wield terror on its own people for nothing more than opportunistic motivations.
