Bangladesh activists brief UN rights chief on ‘police state’

DHAKA: Bangladeshi activists said on Monday they briefed the visiting UN human rights chief on gross violations including extrajudicial killings and disappearances under Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina.

Michelle Bachelet is the first UN rights chief to visit Bangladesh, and is also due to visit camps housing hundreds of thousands of Rohingya refugees who fled a 2017 military onslaught in Myanmar. She met with rights activists in Dhaka on Monday.

"We said (Bangladesh) is now a police state, not a people’s state," said Sanjida Islam Tulee, a sister of an opposition official allegedly abducted by the notorious elite Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) in 2013 who never returned.

"We said more than 600 people have become victims of enforced disappearance by the state agencies," she told AFP, adding that they also spoke about the independence of the country’s judiciary.

Tulee is a coordinator of Mayer Daak (The Call of the Mothers), which represents hundreds of victims of disappearances and their families, and those killed in allegedly staged police encounters.

In December, the United States imposed sanctions on the RAB as well as seven top security officers, including the national police chief, over gross human rights violations. The government denies the allegations of disappearances and extrajudicial killings, with one minister saying that some of those who went missing in fact fled Bangladesh.