Move to get an International Criminal Court investigation into state violence

On 1 December 2013, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay pointed out in a press statement that Bangladesh was a State Party to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court and added

“In other situations, we have seen cases of political or election related violence where the perpetrators of such acts - including political leadership - have faced prosecution.”

Although it was generally interpreted at the time as a warning to both the government and the opposition, the press statement had in fact only referred to opposition violence, stating earlier on that:

“In the past week, we have seen acts as extreme as protestors throwing molotov cocktails onto public buses without allowing the occupants to escape, leaving women and children with horrific burns.”

Whatever Pillay's intention may have been, today marked the first formal attempt by lawyers to get the ICC to engage with Bangladesh.

A look at political violence in Bangladesh

With the 5 January 2014 'elections' unable to provide the government the requisite political or moral legitimacy to govern the country, Awami league politicians have focused on shoring up their right to govern by pointing to the need to deal with 'terrorism' committed by the opposition parties as shown by the pre-election vehicle burning and post-election communal attacks.

This strategy has also had the added benefit of helping the government to help justify the joint force operations to remove 'terrorism' from the country, which has since the elections resulted in a spate of deaths of opposition leaders and activists.

The Awami League has of course every right to criticise the opposition parties for their apparent role in a political pre-election strategy which resulted in the burning to death of at least 25 members of the public. And whilst, it is unlikely that the communal attacks on Hindu villages were part of any opposition political strategy, it seems clear that the opposition party members/supporters were involved in many of the attacks - and at the very least both the Bangladesh Nationalist Party and the Jamaat-e-Islami can be held responsible for their failure to reign in their supporters from what were pretty foreseeable acts of violence.

That being said it is also important to recognise the nature of state violence.