Human Rights and Humanitarian Intervention….

According to the speech Dr. Solimullah Khan

Human Rights Law

Human rights is a social and political subject focusing on the question of which aspects
of life and society are inherent and necessary for the ethical treatment of all human
beings, regardless of race, religion, age, income, or other elements of social division.
Many non-profit and government organizations interact with the subject of human rights
to determine overarching missions and services. It is also a subject common in the
practice and interpretation of law, as well as in social services roles, such as mental and
physical healthcare, substance abuse counseling, and education. Some organizations
also refer to United Nations Human Rights Counsel guidelines.

• The crux of international human rights law: to afford legal protection of every
human being on the planet earth.

• “All individuals, solely by virtue of being human beings, have rights which no
society or State should deny”.

• Unfortunately, however, there are radically different definitions, and

interpretations of human rights, and different approaches.

Categorisation of human rights:

Human rights are generally divided into three main categories:

(1) Civil and political rights;

(2) Economic, social and cultural rights; and

(3) Group or peoples’ rights.

They are often confusingly expressed in terms of “generations” of human rights: the
first, the second, and the third generation respectively.

1. Civil and political rights (freedom of expression, freedom of peaceful

assembly, freedom from torture, freedom from arbitrary arrest and detention,
 right to a fair trial, etc.) derive from the natural rights philosophy of John Locke,
Rousseau and others.

• They protect against encroachments of government.

2. Economic, social and cultural rights (e.g., right to work, right to education,
right to access to health care) attained recognition in the twentieth century with
the advent of socialism.

• They argued that achievement of economic and social rights was a pre-condition
for other rights.

• That is, until the economic and social rights were realized a State was not in a
position to provide civil and political rights.

3. Group or peoples’ rights emerged as recently as the 1970s and are

supported by developing countries.

• The focus is on collective as opposed to individual rights.

• The right to development and the right to self-determination are two main
examples.

• In the early 1970s, thanks to their numerical superiority, the developing countries
managed to elaborate their own philosophy of human rights.

A major part of the academic debates centering on why democracy in Bangladesh

stumbles so miserably involves the question of colonial legacy. Granted that narratives
on colonial inheritance provide substantive insights in understanding the morass
confronting the nation, they often fall short of interpreting how problems are derived
from present institutions, laws and procedures. As long as democracy is perceived in
terms of human rights governance, this is vital that institutions, laws and procedures
accommodate democratic principles.

Colonial experiences of oppression prompted Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and Sri

Lanka to include in their constitutions fundamental rights and acknowledgment of
sovereignty of citizens, paramountcy of law, explicit guarantees of civil and political
rights, and enumerated social and economic rights 2. After almost forty- two years of
independence, Bangladeshis are yet to see these promises translated into the policy
formulation and governance apparatuses of the state, and instead, state turned out to
be a source of massive corruption, torture and killing.
HUMAN RIGHTS AND GOVERNANCE IN A PSEUDO-DEMOCRACY:

A constitutional-legal-structural approval of dictatorial elements throughout the state

machinery, despite the presence of apparent democratic institutions modeled somewhat
on a fusion of U.S. and Westminster type of democracy, does not understandably
guarantee civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights to its citizens, as have
been ensured in the Western liberal democracies. Instead, presence of apparent
democratic entities, arrangement of a national election and universal adult franchise
provide a blanket of legitimacy to the misgovernance of the elected regimes. The post-
electoral legitimacy enjoyed by the regimes, comprised of unparalleled corrupt
leadership, has invariably been used as a weapon to deceive a population, which has
just reached a literacy rate of 55.9 percent.

Scholars have often measured Bangladeshi people and their leaders with the same
scale and engendered a fallacy by emphasizing more on cultural shortcomings. As far
as post-independence politics in Bangladesh is concerned, Bangladeshis and their
political leaders are different. The former have experienced a long trajectory of
bloodsheds in striving for democracy, equity and justice, and the latter have rapidly
‘earned’ money while in power. Repressions like tortures, killings and enforced
disappearances have been used to silence voices that have spoken about the ruling
elites’ corruption. Corruptions within the non -governmental organizations – often in
collusion with the political leadership – are also rampant. Tortures, perpetrated by the
law enforcing agencies, take place under direct or indirect control of the incumbent
government. Reasons of torture are primitive, as opposed to the notion of institutional
remedies: either to oppress the adversaries or to coerce the victim into paying money.

Bangladesh acceded to the United Nations Convention against Corruption (UNCAC) in

2007 during the military-controlled interim government, but the government is yet to
reorganize its relevant institutions, including national Anti-Corruption Commission
(ACC), as per its treaty obligations.