Who will account for the days lost in enforced disappearance?

On June 30, 2015, a fish trader named Mosharraf was allegedly beaten up by members of the police, placed inside an empty septic tank, and left there for nearly 36 hours. Later, he was shown arrested for carrying 200 pieces of yaba. Today, Mosharraf isn't fighting in court to get justice for his ill-treatment but to prove his innocence in regards to the drug case. There are many types of enforced disappearance cases that we hear about in Bangladesh. And being picked up by law enforcers and not being produced in court within the legal timeframe of 24 hours—and instead being detained at a clandestine place before that, leaving hours, days, or weeks in custody unaccounted for—is just one of them.

Despite widespread allegations of law enforcers using enforced disappearance as a tactic against victims who remain untraceable, collecting data on such cases has proven to be difficult. The issue only came under substantial media scrutiny after cartoonist Ahmed Kishore filed a case alleging that he was kept in an unknown location for several days and tortured. Typically, despite the number of individuals who have gone missing racking up in the hundreds, once any of these people returns, they all seem to go into a cocoon, distancing themselves from the glare of the media and staying silent on their whole experience of being disappeared—that is, if they are "lucky" enough to return alive.

Detaining someone and not presenting them in court within 24 hours is a clear violation of the law. It is also a violation of human rights. It contradicts a number of different international treaties that Bangladesh is a signatory to. Still, according to rights organisations, there are hundreds of alleged cases of enforced disappearances that the authorities continue to pay very little heed to. And then there are many more cases where, despite the victims disappearing for a few days, they are only shown arrested and produced in court much later, without any explanation as to their whereabouts during the time that they had remained traceless—or any explanation whatsoever as to what had happened to them.

The tendency on the part of the higher authorities—when their political adversaries, or people they view as their opposition, disappear and remain traceless for days on end—is bound to eventually trickle down onto others. And we have now reached a point where enforced disappearance has become normalised for most members of the law enforcing agencies, as well as other state machineries. It means that some law enforcers might resort to such tactics even for their own parochial reasons, knowing that such cases have become so common and are so readily overlooked that chances of them getting caught or punished is highly unlikely.

The truth is, even if it isn't any of the state organs that are responsible for these individuals disappearing—which is what the victims' families almost always claim—it is incumbent upon the state to investigate what happened to them, and bring them safely back to their families. Any failure to do so is a failure on the part of the state to fulfil its mandate of protecting the constitutional rights of citizens. And that is a most egregious failure—one that should entail accountability and serious penalties.