Remarks by Lord Avebury, vice-chair of the UK Parliamentary Human Rights Group, chairing a seminar on Bangladesh : logjam on the road to free and fair elections in the House of Lords, September 27, 2006

‘With only a month to go before the caretaker government takes office for the period leading up to the elections in January 2007, the prospects for free and fair elections in Bangladesh are looking bleak'.

‘The US National Democratic Institute has already referred to the incompetence and bias of the National Electoral Commission, all four of whose members were previously activists of parties belonging to the coalition government. After being ordered to compile a new voters' register based on a house-to-house canvass, the EC has come up with a list containing 11 million more names than there were on the 2001 register plus the young people who reached the age of 18 during those years. But there are also millions of eligible voters who haven't been canvassed or recorded. This is mass-produced fraud which must be exposed and corrected' .

‘The NDI commented on the ‘rampant and escalating violence' of recent times, including the assassination of Shah AMS Kibria, a former Finance Minister; the attempt on the life of our High Commissioner, Anwar Chowdhury; the multiple grenade attack on the Leader of the Opposition, Sheikh Hasina, which killed 24 people; the suicide bombing of two judges, and the simultaneous explosion of 500 bombs all over the country in August 2005'.

‘In addition to those terrorist atrocities, 800 people have been killed by the ‘Rapid Action Battalion' forces in encounters and shootouts, but not a single person has been captured or injured in those incidents. And in the last month, there has been an escalation of violence by the police against political demonstrators, including the notorious attack on Mr Saber Hossain Chowdhury, Political and Organising Secretary to the Leader of the Opposition, causing him injuries that were so severe that he had to come here to seek advice from a neurologist'.

‘Two MPs were also badly injured in attacks by the police - Asaduzzaman Noor, and Mohammed Nasim. We are preparing to submit formal complaints on their behalf to the Committee on the Human Rights of Parliamentarians of the Inter-Parliamentary Union. We also know of at least two women who suffered injuries at a demo on September 12: Mothia Chowdhury and Advocate Shaira Khatun, and it may be that we can also get the material for a complaint to the UN Rapporteur on Violence against Women. The police must have been given orders to target opposition leaders, as Amnesty International highlighted in a recent press release. The violence has got even worse since then, and I believe it is part of a deliberate campaign to incapacitating opposition leaders and activists in advance of the election'.

‘The meeting was addresses by Dr Kamal Hossain, Ex Foreign Minister and a distinguished lawyer. In his speech he said, ‘The current regime of BNP-Jamaat are blatantly involved in engineering every election mechanism to ensure their victory at the next election. There have been other sinister developments. The state is seen to be sponsoring violence which must stop. Recently appointed police officers, whose basic training was curtailed so that they could be deployed during the caretaker administration, have now been appointed as sub-inspectors without the in-service 18 months' training normally required for command posts. Most of the men were activists of the youth wing of the ruling BNP and of their coalition partner Jamaat-e-Islami. These men were recently responsible for carrying out assaults on Awami League leaders, Saber Hossain Chowdhury, Asaduzzaman Noor & Md Nasim'.

‘Mr Kamal Hossain also questioned the voters list numbers rising from 70 million to 93 million within the last five years prepared by the regime and said, ‘Free and fair election is not a matter of choice. The government has to uphold the constitution and restore rule of law in order to ensure free and fair election'.

‘The NGO Affairs Bureau, which controls aid agency funds granted to Bangladeshi NGOs, has been established to financially strangle any independent NGOs which might blow the whistle on malpractices and violence, while at the same time the BNP and Jamaat are busy registering bogus election observation NGOs, whose verdict can be predicted in advance. Proshika, a secular development NGO which had attracted substantial foreign aid for their programmes including micro-credit and agriculture, was raided on September 9 and 180 of its staff arrested, effectively closing it down and causing losses of tens of thousands of pounds'.

‘The seminar was attended by representatives of Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Survival International, International Crisis Group, International Bangladesh Foundation, Christian Solidarity Worldwide, Commonwealth Secretariat, Bangladesh High Commission UK, and Hudson Institute, USA, The Times Newspaper', Baroness Uddin and Mr. Hary Cohen MP.

Further information: Lord Avebury, 020-7274 4617, email ericavebury.gmail.com