Law and order of society can be jeopardized even with the existence of written and established law if the government and authority do not carry their duty to apply it properly and unbiased-Explain and Illustrate.
1) Introduction: Every society has own view about law and order. In every day life, the sequence of people’s political desires is well defined. First a fall, people desire order. Without order, life is chaotic and people die. Dictatorships usually provide order and law.
Justice required a perfect law and order. When there is law and order in a country, the laws are generally accepted and obeyed. (
2) Law and order be jeopardized even with the existence of a written and established constitution:
In a society, laws are not always written down. Some societies, such as that of the United Kingdom, have no written constitution. In spite of that, it has one of the world’s lowest crime rates. In developed countries crime and corruption is very low when compared to developing countries such as Bangladesh. Bangladesh, in spite of having a parliamentary democracy and a written and established constitution, has been unable to guarantee law and order in its society.
a) Poverty:
Poverty is the lack of basic human needs, such as clean water, nutrition, health care, education, clothing and shelter, because of the inability to afford them. This is also referred to as absolute poverty destitution. Relative poverty is the condition of having fewer resources or less income than others within a society or country, or compared to worldwide averages.
Poverty is a condition characterized by severe deprivation of basic human needs, including food, safe drinking water, sanitation facilities, health, shelter, education and information. It depends not only on income but also on access to services.-World Bank(
b) Low literacy rate:
In Bangladesh, literacy rate is very low. Illiteracy rate increase on poverty rate So most people don’t understand what is right or wrong. So that political system is very poor. They do not understand the political system of the country, and prefer whichever party does anything to help aid the poor.(
c) Lack of Social Awareness:
Lack of social awareness created for poverty and low literacy rate. Crime is perceived to be increasing in the rural and urban areas alike. Serious crimes like hijacking and murder are significantly higher than they were four years ago. Many city dwellers have had first hand experience of hijacking or know a relative who has been hijacked. This has led to an increased fear of going out in the cities. Although in general the urban areas have had a higher increase in crime than the rural areas, they too are not better off. There has been an increase of crime noticed by 1/3rd of the sample and a similar number are now afraid to go out.
The causes of crime remain firmly fixed with the mastics. They are blamed for more than half of the crimes committed. Government activists are blamed by a quarter of the people. For a government which came to power on a mandate of reducing crime and installing order this is very bad news. They have been criticized not only by the majority for the increasing crime levels but also their own party is seen as one of the main causes of it.
3) Why doesn’t the authority carry out their duty properly and without bias?
Crime levels are on the increase in all categories from extortion to murder. This problem is nation wide. It needs to be dealt with in other ways than just using a heavy-handed police force or stiffer punishments. We need to address the economic problems so that civilian can turn to employment rather than crime for a living. We need to educate the people so that they are more responsible to their society. Above all we should also teach the people that ultimately crime does not pay. The personal gains of a few are far outweighed by the disintegration of the moral fabric of society.
How far do things have to go before the government of Bangladesh takes somebody’s recommendations seriously? For a number of years it has been warned–with increasing alarm–by local human rights defenders and their organizations, United Nations bodies, international rights groups and others, that it is moving in the wrong direction. The recommendations of the Asian Legal Resource Centre this August are the latest in a long line of the same, and for persons familiar with the disastrous human rights situation in Bangladesh should not have come as any surprise. Among them was that the UN Human Rights Council should at the nearest possible time suspend the government of Bangladesh’s membership and the UN Under Secretary General for Peacekeeping Operations should review the participation of Bangladeshi personnel in all future missions and suspend the country from sending further troops or police abroad until the RAB is disbanded and victims of extrajudicial killings and other gross rights abuses are given access to a fair means for obtaining redress in accordance with international standards. The recommendations also pointed for the need for the government to
a. Completely detach the judiciary from the executive, as required by both domestic and international law;
b. Remove all political control of public prosecutors and establish an independent prosecution department;
c. End its policy of extrajudicial killings through “crossfire” and investigate and prosecute all perpetrators;
d. Criminalize torture in accordance with international standards and remove its reservation on article 14(1) of the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment;
e. Repeal law that is contrary to international standards of human rights, including section 46 of the Constitution of Bangladesh; sections 54, 132, 197 of the Code of Criminal Procedure; section 86 of the Dhaka Metropolitan Police Ordinance; the Joint Drive Indemnity Act 2003; Special Power Act 1974 and, the Armed Police Battalions (Amendment) Act 2003;
f. Establish a properly independent and powerful anti-corruption agency;
g. Designate an independent body to receive and investigate complaints against the police and other state officers;
and,
h. Set up a national human rights commission.
b) What is the problem with the law enforcement?
It is a very serious matter. Someone should think twice before announcing such laws and specially before issuing any warnings. It does not help.
For example, if you park your car in a no-parking zone, stern action will be taken, if you throw acid, stern action will be taken, if you keep construction materials on the road, you will be prosecuted, if you tease any girls, you will be severely punished, if there is any delay in the Ministry in ‘processing’ stern action, if the concerned Agency goes for Load-shedding unnecessarily, they would be dismissed, the list goes on.
But no action is taken. So what happens? The guilty becomes more daring, they keep on breaking the law. The eve teaser beats up any protester (even killing him/her), there is car parked on the roads everywhere creating traffic jam. The shopkeepers will charge you more and more defying Government prices, the Launches and Buses carry passengers far in excess of its capacity, the Property Builders/Contractors keep all the construction material on the roads, the “processing” takes years to complete.
The effect is even worse. The guilty sees that the threats are empty, so they get involved in worse offences, the prices rise, the corrupt get more corrupt. Even ordinary innocent people start thinking about committing crime, as they become frustrated and see that it carries no punishment.
Above all, the people lose confidence in the Government, who may feel that people should see that while the Government is sincere, it is the Bureaucracy who is to blame and people understand that. Unfortunately, they don’t see it that way. People will always blame the Government. It has been observed that people blame the Government if there are accidents, if there is no power (they don’t care whose fault it is), if there is too much rain, if there is a cyclone, just name it.
The only solution I can think of is to do what the Government promises. If you enact a law, if you issue warnings, and if anybody violates the law, take “REAL” action against them.
c) Justice delayed is justice denied (Gladstone 1868):
“Justice delayed is justice denied” is a legal maxim meaning that if legal redress is available for a party that has suffered some injury, but is not forthcoming in a timely fashion, it is effectively the same as having no redress at all. This principle is the basis for the right to a speedy trial and similar rights which are meant to expedite the legal system, because it is unfair for the injured party to have to sustain the injury with little hope for resolution. The phrase has become a rallying cry for legal reformers who view courts or governments as acting too slowly in resolving legal issues either because the existing system is too complex or overburdened, or because the issue or party in question lacks political favor.
Any killing is a violation of human rights. We in Bangladesh are dealing with two types of killing. One relates to killing in custody, which, again, is of two types – in police custody and in prison. The other is what people generally know as extrajudicial executions. These are killings of people who have been arrested or are not in a position to pose any threat against law enforcement personnel. The law enforcement personnel are nonetheless using lethal force against them causing severe injuries or death. So these are all human rights violation. And Amnesty International has always raised its concern about extrajudicial killing, extrajudicial executions, whether in the custody of police or in the custody of jail officials.
In that respect I think we have a very interesting situation now. The High Court has ordered the police and the government to investigate three deaths in custody. This is a welcome development. We welcome and congratulate the High Court for taking such a strong position with regard to a case of human rights violation.
However, the government must not wait for a High Court order to react. Whenever there is a case of human rights violation, be it custodial death or extrajudicial killing or torture, the government needs to come forward and launch an investigation; it needs not wait for the court or any other party or institution to tell it what it should do.
Amnesty International has been looking into such cases. When the police find a body, they have to take its photograph, file a report and send it for post mortem. There have been cases in which a family could not trace one of their relatives and, after vigorous search, discovered that the individual had been buried in a graveyard. They had the problem of finding the grave of their relatives because there was no record. That is one part of such cases.
We have also found that people were picked up by law enforcers only to be found dead a few days later, with the law enforcers claiming that they knew nothing about the victims although the members of the victims’ family claimed that the deceased had been in the law enforcers’ custody. Such was the case in one of the three recent deaths in custody and it was alleged that the man was tortured to extract money. It is imperative that the authorities should take note of such incidents.
Another difficulty is that there is no specific law forbidding torture. The constitution forbids torture but you need a law to enable people to file a complaint against an official for committing torture. We do not have that. But there is a draft law which was placed in parliament but I do not know the latest development with regard to the bill. It was a private member’s bill.
The fact that limiting freedom does not always contain violence should make us pause. In fact, our failures with regard to containing political violence indicate how imperfectly we understand its nature. In what follows, I am going to argue that the West’s equation of freedom and sovereignty is, in fact, a conflation, one based on a deeper confusion of two very different attitudes we can have towards our others. My claim will be that it is only by untangling them that we can gain a practical understanding of the nature of political violence.
4) Law enforcement requires changes:
Throughout the centuries people in law enforcement have encountered common problems. People created rules and regulations (laws) to act as guidelines on how to conduct oneself in a manner which the majority of the population considers “normal” behavior. Since the first law was written, the law enforcement community, local as well as federal, is confronted with a litany of allegations that officers have violated the public’s trust, engaged in criminal acts, abused their authority, violated citizens’ civil rights, used excessive force, been disrespectful and arrogant, “doctored” evidence and generally lost credibility with the communities they serve. Over the years, police acts of corruption, violence, robbery and other predatory misconduct have in fact been perpetrated by members of the police community; however, investigation further indicates that such corruption is not systemic but rather is confined to small groups of officers (pockets) or to individuals.
4) Conclusion:
These recommendations, if treated with any seriousness, may go some way towards dealing with “law and order” problems, not by doing “whatever is needed”, but by recognizing the primacy of the rule of law as a solution. When order is placed before law, at whatever cost–as suggested by the minister–it is bound to fail, and take the lives of countless victims with it. Where the law is put first, and institutions used to ensure that its position is established and maintained, only then it is possible to talk with sincerity about what can be done for one’s country.