Protection of custodial torture & death prevention under the local regime & the International human rights

Md Riad Arefin: As B.R Ambedkar brilliantly quoated once that the law is a very powerful weapon. What’s important is who we protect by using it. It is a fundamental right and a constitutional mandate for each and every citizen to have the equal protection of law. In India, in 1993 there occurred an incident that police usually used schedule caste and schedule tribe people to have in their custody and tortured them to confess about a crime which they never committed and with this, police usually tried close the unsolved cases .one such case came to justice K. Chandru who was advocate at that time ,he found Rajakannu from irula tribe is being arrested and got dead in the custody of police. In this case after the hearing the justice has been delivered as Rajakannu’s wife got compensated ₹3 lakh and the police who killed him was arrested.

Now this was an event of india, then what about Bangladesh ? what is the scenario here? According to [Ain O Salish Kendra (Law and Arbitration Center)], media reports suggests at least 28 people have died in police custody in the past two years and five this year. This is quite alarming as under article 32 of our constitution mandates every citizen right to life with full dignity and under article 27 provides the equal rights to everyone before law. Article 35(5) of Bangladeshi constitution also provides that no person shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading punishment and with these article 31 provides that any action not to taken to anyone without due process of law. These constitutional human rights originates from articles 3,5,7,8,9,10 and 11 of the universal declaration of human rights, 1948 & under articles 3, 6,7,9,10 of International covenant on civil and political rights, 1966. Bangladesh also
ratified Convention Against Torture (CAT), 1984 which has the inclusive provisions regarding prevention and punishment of torture and ill treatment .In article 4 of the CAT provides that each state party to the Convention shall ensure all acts of torture are offences under its criminal law and shall ensure that the relevant penalties sufficiently reflect the gravity of the offences in question. There is an only law regarding custodial torture and death prevention in Bangladesh legislated in 2013 before the law came into being in 2003 High court division in the case of BLAST v Bangladesh, 55 DLR (2003) 363 stated that the very system of taking an accused into remand and extorting information by application of force is totally against the spirit of the constitution.

According to the only law of Custodial torture and death prevention act,2013 for any death in custody, the custodian would be awarded with rigorous life imprisonment or a fine of Tk100,000. In addition, they must compensate family members of the affected with Tk200,000. This punishment is too less for a victim to be awarded as proper justice & with this under section 5(5), a police officer not below the rank of the alleged perpetrator to investigate the case of the particular crime. This also sometimes frustrate the actual spirit of the law as police can vitiate with the findings and can create the possibilities to not getting the proper justice for the victim. In the end, it is only to be expressed that such a heinous crime like custodial torture should be banned from the democratic country like ours. This is not such crime which occurs against individuals only rather it is such a heinous crime which is a threat to the humanity .

Writer is an LLM student at the Department of Law, University Of Dhaka.