Wednesday 30 / October / 2024
Dhaka: Bangladesh's cabinet on Monday approved a draft law prescribing the death penalty for drug offences, despite widespread criticism over a drugs crackdown in which police have shot dead more than 200 people since May.
Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina launched the campaign ahead of a general election due by December, but the killings have prompted fears among rights groups of a bloody Philippine-style campaign to wipe out drugs.
The Narcotics Control Act defines methamphetamines, also known as "yaba", and other drugs, such as "shisha", as narcotics for the first time, Cabinet Secretary Mohammad Shafiul Alam told reporters after the meeting chaired by Hasina.
"It proposes the death sentence as maximum punishment for producing, smuggling, distributing and using more than 5 gm of 'yaba'," he said, adding that possession of less than 5 gm (0.18 oz) would attract a maximum jail term of five years.
Alam said the stern punishment was needed to curb the spread of the highly potent stimulant smuggled in from neighbouring Myanmar. Bangladesh has said an influx last year of Rohingya fleeing Myanmar is partly to blame for soaring methamphetamine use.
But many Rohingya say their young people are being pushed into crime because they cannot legally work or, in many cases, receive aid. Hasina has vowed to continue the campaign until Bangladesh is freed of the drug menace. In more than a third of the killings recorded by Dhaka-based human rights group Odhikar since mid-May, the suspects were arrested before they were killed. The government has dismissed accusations of extrajudicial killings, saying the crackdown has popular support.
Meanwhile, Bangladesh President Abdul Hamid on Monday gave his assent to a controversial new law that media groups fear could cripple press freedom and curb free speech in the South Asian nation.
Parliament passed the Digital Security Act on September 19, combining the colonial-era Official Secrets Act with tough new provisions such as arrests without a warrant. "The president has given his assent to the Digital Security Act today, making it law," his press secretary, Joynal Abedin, told Reuters. Last month, media groups cancelled protests against the law after the government promised to amend it. But their concerns were not addressed, said Manzurul Ahsan Bulbul, a former president of the Bangladesh Federal Journalist Union who took part in talks with the government.
"We are frustrated as, during the meeting, we placed several proposals but none was reflected in the law," he said. "Now we will see what the cabinet decides and accordingly will take action."
Abedin said the government could only consider amending the measure after it became law. "The law can be amended at any time if cabinet desires, so the journalist community need not to be worried," Anisul Haq, the law minister, told Reuters.
New York-based Human Rights Watch has called the law a "tool ripe for abuse and a clear violation of the country’s obligations under international law to protect free speech".
Opponents say the digital law is the latest authoritarian move by Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, criticised for suppressing student protests in August and a war on drugs that has prompted accusations of extrajudicial killings by security forces, a charge the government denies. Hasina has defended the digital law as necessary to combat cyber crime.
"The journalists are only thinking about their interest, not about society and only for that they are raising their voices," Hasina said this week.
Scores of people, including journalists, have been jailed for online criticism of the government since Hasina returned to power in 2009. The law has also drawn opposition internationally. The US ambassador to Bangladesh, Marcia Bernicat, said last month the "Digital Security Act could be used to suppress and criminalise free speech, all to the detriment of Bangladesh's democracy, development and prosperity."
