Colombo, October 9 – The Canada-based Global Centre for Democratic Governance (GCDG) has slammed the report of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) on human rights violations during the July-August 2024 violent protests in Bangladesh, which resulted in the ouster of the Awami League government headed by Sheikh Hasina.
The OHCHR’s report documents incidents that violated universal human rights, including the excessive use of force, arbitrary arrests, enforced disappearances, and restrictions on freedom of expression and assembly, as well as recommendations to prevent future occurrences of such violations. But the report was fundamentally flawed, the Global Centre for Democratic Governance (GCDG) says.
“The report as a whole appears seriously biased, mainly used the selected information and documents provided by the newly recruited or promoted (the so-called reward promotion) loyal officials of the interim government, and interviews of the victims, witnesses and supporters of the wining party in the political fight and completely ignored the defeated party, i.e., the previous government, officials and members of Bangladesh Awami league (BAL) and the officials and who were in charge of maintaining law and order situation in the field at the time of protest, ” the GCDG says.
“Most disturbingly, the report consciously underestimated rights violations involving thousands of victims who lost everything, including their lives, property, and even the right to live in their own country due to atrocities committed by the supporters and alliance political parties of Dr Yunus, particularly Jamat-e-Islami and Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), from 15 July to 15 August 2024.”
“The first impression of any average, conscious, and neutral reader of the report will be that human rights are something only applicable to and enjoyable by the winning party in a political conflict.”
“We do not believe that the publication accurately described the country’s actual situation during the previous government’s rule. OHCHR fact-finding team ignored more relevant and objective research findings describing socio-economic, education, health, poverty alleviation, infrastructure, and other developments of the country during the past 15 years (2009 to 2024) by Sheikh Hasina’s government.”
“Most critically, the report ignored or intentionally avoided highlighting the most critical factors: the complex social and geo-political landscape of the country, and the involvement of certain foreign organizations and governments that transformed the very reasonable and fair quota abolishing movement of the students into a full-blown, hostile, bloody regime-changing conflict leading to human rights violations.”
“The report has attempted to portray the protesters (ultimately, who formed a political party, the National Citizen Party, NCP, promoted by Dr Yunus) as a symbol of democratic restoration. However, since August 5th, 2024, the situation has unfolded in a manner far from the promised progress. The Yunus government now faces accusations of committing the very human rights abuses it aimed at, thereby threatening its moral legitimacy.”
“In this context, it is worth mentioning that the OHCHR report did not criticize the interim government for offering the indemnity to the perpetrators of atrocities, killing, maiming, arson and all types of crimes committed at the height of the conflict from 5 Aug to 10 August.”
“The students and people who actively worked for the movement on the field to make this mass uprising successful will not be arrested or harassed. Cases will not be filed against them for the incidents related to the uprising from July 15 to August 8.”
“The OHCHR team did not even describe the implications on human rights in Bangladesh due to this indemnity proclamation. Because of the implicit bias of the fact-finding team towards the interim Govt, interested readers would like to verify the relationship between Prof. Yunus and the OHCHR team, particularly with the high commissioner, Mr. Volker Turk.”
“Readers also will be interested in verifying cross-relationships among Hilary and Bill Clinton, Prof Yunus, and Mr. Volker Turk. It appears that the widely accepted view that decades of enmity between Prime Minister Shaikh Hasina and prof Yunus played the most vital role in the regime-change turn of the July-August quota reform agitation by the students.”
“The bias is also explicitly evident in the report. For example, the OHCHR team labelled the July-August event and their report as the “turning point in the country’s recent history”.
“In this context, we refer to the famous remark of pushing the “reset button” of wiping out the country’s history of liberation war . Dr Yunus’s staunch alliance, Bangladesh Jamat-e-Islami, and other fundamentalist forces, those who opposed the independence of Bangladesh in 1971, define the turning point as the demise of the spirit of the liberation war and the defeat of proliferating forces.”
“As Yunus’ indirect partner, OHCHR’s turning point can easily be understood by the events that were unfolding in the aftermath of the fall of the Sheikh Hasina Government. People saw the unparalleled and unimaginable destruction of the symbols, monuments, and achievements of the liberation war, atrocity, killing, mob violence, extortion by forces aligned to Dr Yunus, and most importantly, impunity granted by the Yunus government for the crimes committed by Yunus’ political alliances.”
“The report foregrounds state violence but gives less attention to protester-led violence and the structural socioeconomic drivers of unrest, leading to partial framing. In Bangladesh’s polarized environment, the report risks being dismissed as externally biased, a common challenge in human rights monitoring.”
“The report was prepared based on 230 confidential interviews, mostly conducted online and reportedly in face-to-face interviews and meetings conducted in Bangladesh. Curiously, the report did not clarify the number of online and face-to-face interviews. The methodology also did not define the criteria for choosing the interviewees. This is a serious methodological weakness and suggests that they might have relied on the interim government in choosing the victims and witnesses.”
“OHCHR only examined 29 Victims out of the reported 11,700 victims, which is utterly inadequate, and they did not mention how these victims were selected.”
“Despite OHCHR’s requests, the Interim Government did not allow the team to meet with the leadership of the Army or the Directorate-General of Forces Intelligence. This indicates that the interim government only gave access to selected individuals and organizations who would deliver information favouring the Interim Government.”
“ Given the long-term friendship with Prof Yunus, Hilary Clinton, and, consequently, the UN High Commissioner of Human Rights, it can easily be inferred that the fact-finding mission and its report are part of the broader meticulous design of Dr Yunus to discredit the ousted government and Bangladesh Awami League.”
“The OHCHR team interviewed several Jamaat-e-Islami and Chhatra Shibir supporters Jamat-e-Islami and Chhatra Shibir are strong partners of the interim govt., and their version of any information must be biased. It is widely believed that these entities and their armed supporters were behind most of the deaths and atrocities of the July-August 2024 agitation.”
“Another important weakness of the report is that OHCHR shared this report with the Interim Government before publication. This is likely a mutual agreement that allowed the Interim government to shape the report in their favor. This clearly showed that it was not an independent report; it was a report with major input from the Interim Government and a biased report with a legal covering of the UN.”
“The OHCHR inquiry into Bangladesh’s July–August 2024 protests rests on a fragile mandate. It was not authorized by the Human Rights Council, which is the established UN practice for politically contested contexts. Still, it was instead invited solely by the Interim Government of Dr Muhammad Yunus.”.
“The Bangladesh mission rested on the authority of a regime that itself lacked constitutional legitimacy. The Interim Government emerged from political upheaval, rather than electoral or constitutional endorsement, thereby lacking the sovereign standing to authorize such an international intervention.”
“The credibility deficit is compounded by the OHCHR’s validation procedure. The draft report was shared exclusively with the Interim Government prior to publication, and their comments were incorporated into the final version. This is contrary to OHCHR’s own guidance on commissions of inquiry, which stresses equal opportunity for all parties to be heard (OHCHR, Commissions of Inquiry Guidance (2015)). By excluding the ousted administration and independent critics, OHCHR created an asymmetry that aligns its findings with the Interim Government’s political narrative.”
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