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A fake arrest warrant was issued on July 1 by the Chief Judicial Magistrate's Court of Dhaka against Case No. 15(3) 2006 registered by the Keraniganj police station for a complaint of illegal drug selling. On Aug. 18, the Keraniganj police of Dhaka arrested Md. Milon, the son of a poor farmer, based on the fake warrant. Milon has since been detained and the case is pending before the Sessions Judge's Court of Dhaka.
Issuance of an arrest warrant includes certain procedures that involve the police and court staff including the judge. Similarly, implementing the warrant by the police also involves virtually the same group of professionals including prosecutors when the person is produced before the court, which issued the warrant.
It can be assumed that somebody might have conspired to harass the poor man and managed to falsify documents using loopholes in the system. However, this assumption is followed by questions on the quality and credibility of basic institutions like the police, prosecution and the judiciary. How did all these professionals and departments fail to identify the false warrant when the process of prosecution began? Are the police, prosecutors and the judge capable and competent to carry out their duties? Should not the police who made the arrest, the prosecutors who acknowledged the police report and the judge who ordered the detention be held accountable for throwing the man in jail?
In another incident, Kamal Uddin was convicted by the Public Safety Tribunal of Chittagong in 2004 and sentenced to 14 years of rigorous imprisonment. Kamal did not want to suffer the pain of prison life, so he hired Abu Bakar Siddique, a Hafiz – one who memorizes the whole text of the holy Quran – to take his place in prison. Siddique, who was poor, agreed on the condition that he be paid BDT 500 (around US$7) per month with a promise of bail as soon as possible. Following the oral agreement with Kamal, on Oct. 16, 2006, Siddique surrendered before the court in the name of the original convict and has been in prison ever since.
The superintendent of police of Chittagong admitted to the media that law enforcement officers had failed to arrest Kamal and knew about Siddique's real identity. Without releasing Siddique from prison and suppressing the truth, police officers made it clear that they had covered up their failure to arrest Kamal and produce him in court.
In this case, the prosecutors, defense lawyers and the judge are liable for allowing a person to be "hired" for imprisonment, proved by their inefficiency to carry out their duties as per the law. However, all those professionals are still at their respective jobs.
These kinds of incidents indicate the lack of functionality and credibility of the criminal justice system of Bangladesh. The police are "capable" of arresting an innocent person without any accountability or legal justification. The prosecutors consent to police reports whenever a person is arrested and produced in court, and the judge is only a substitute for a rubber stamp. The criminal justice system, which allows all related professionals to do and undo whatever they have been doing for decades, seems to be impaired by poor infrastructure, procedure and efficiency. How long can this continue?
These institutions require systematic and thorough reforms in the interests of the nation. The police need to be educated and cultivated to a level that ensures they are capable of identifying the true culprits to a crime prior to making an arrest. That way, no one could be illegally arrested and detained, tortured and ill-treated in custody anymore. If this continues to occur, then the perpetrators should be punished without any bias, corruption or manipulation of the system. This is the only way to increase public faith in the police and other law enforcement agencies in Bangladesh.
Prosecutors should be recruited beyond partisan politics with the knowledge that their professional skills are inseparably important for the justice-delivery mechanism. They should not be pawns in the hands of the police and judges or mere tools of prestigious and professional groups within the current system.
Lawyers, with few exceptions, are looked down upon as ordinary people in the judicial arena, which degrades their ethical and professional position and commitment gradually. The Bangladesh Bar Council seems unable to look after its license-holders and along with lawyers have dragged down their dignified profession to the level of street-hawkers.
Judges must be trained beyond the executive control and under judicial capacity to make them realize that they are not clerks in the judicial system. A poorly-adjudicated decision of a judge can ruin the life of a person and family, which happens in hundreds of cases in Bangladesh.
All these professionals should learn to support the nation by upholding the laws of the land rather than destroying public faith in legal institutions through arbitrary, abusive and callous actions against citizens. They should reform their thinking, mindsets and ways of utilizing authority. Likewise, policymakers should reform basic legal institutions and mechanisms to ensure accountability and put an end to recurrence of the current repressive style of governance.
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(Rater Zonaki is the pseudonym of a human rights defender based in Hong Kong working at the Asian Human Rights Commission. He is a Bangladeshi national with a degree in literature from a university in Dhaka. He began his career as a journalist in 1990 and engaged in human rights activism at the grassroots level in his country for more than a decade. He also worked as an editor for publications on human rights and socio-cultural issues and contributed to other similar publications.)
