Belated Acknowledgment of Abuse?

Despite scores of reports of national and international human rights groups with evidence of the abuse of the law and its deleterious impacts on freedom of speech, particularly increasing self-censorship among journalists, the government repeatedly denied any misuse of the law. Such denial continued in both the national and international scene. However, in late 2021, ministers began to tacitly indicate that they were aware of these abuses. Law Minister Anisul Haq, on November 4, 2021 told that an exception regarding the arrests will be made. He said the journalists who are accused of violating the DSA and cases have been filed against them won’t be arrested immediately (The Business Standard 2021). Such an exception betrays the letter and spirit of the rule of law and equality in the eyes of the law, noted analysts. One analyst stated, ‘Sadly, his assurances are even more troubling, because none of his words can be found in the law. Therefore, in order to afford this extraordinary exemption to a journalist, the officials and employees of the republic have to sidestep the letter and spirit of the law” (Ahmed 2022). The tacit acknowledgement of abuse of the law has become more pronounced in mid-December. The Law Minister, on December 29, 2021, unequivocally stated, ‘I acknowledge that the act was misused and abused’ (The Daily Star 2021). This statement came on the heels of an intense discussion about the state of human rights after the US Treasury Department imposed sanctions on the Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) and seven of its current and former officials (VOA 2021). In March 2022, Foreign Minister M A Momen, in an interview with a Bengali newspaper said that DSA has been abused, but ‘only a bit’ (Prothom Alo 2022). Subsequently, the law minister, while meeting the US ambassador on April 7, that ‘the Digital Security Act had been abused in some cases; (The Daily Observer 2022)

Since December 2021, the government has claimed that it has two steps to mitigate the situation. According to the Law Minister, Bangladesh has initiated a dialogue with the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights regarding the best practices and the second step is appointment of a monitoring cell within the law ministry. According to government sources, the monitoring cell will vet all cases before an arrest is made. Interestingly, neither civil society members nor journalists have been involved in these measures. Increasingly the impression is that the government is likely to amend the law. However, the question remains – whether this will be a repeat of 2018, when the ICT Act was reformed only with a more draconian Digital Security Act (DSA). Such apprehension is not only based on experience, but also because of the government’s recent move to enact laws. Two drafts which are in the process of being laws of the land are cases in point; they are the Data Protection Act (Islam 2021), and Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission Regulation for Digital, Social Media and OTT Platforms (Preetha 2022).