Home ›› 21 Jan 2022 ›› Back
Twelve human rights watchdogs in a letter to UN Under-Secretary-General Jean-Pierre Lacroix have demanded that the United Nations Department of Peace Operations should ban the Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) of Bangladesh in any UN deployment.
The Department of Peacekeeping Operations is yet to response to the letter which was sent privately on November 8, 2021 and the organisations on Thursday made the letter public, said a release of New York-based Human Rights Watch.
The rights groups documented widespread abuses the by RAB and UN’s human rights experts have also voiced concerns about allegations that members of the unit engaged in torture, enforced disappearances, and other human rights violations.
“If Secretary General Guterres is serious about ending human rights abuses by UN peacekeepers, he will ensure that units with proven records of abuse like the Rapid Action Battalion are excluded from deployment,” said Kerry Kennedy, president of Robert F Kennedy Human Rights, in the letter.
“The evidence is clear; now it’s time for the UN to draw a line,” he added.
On December 10, the United States government designated RAB as a “foreign entity that is responsible for or complicit in, or has directly or indirectly engaged in, serious human rights abuse,” under the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act.
The US also sanctioned seven current or former officials of the RAB, including the country’s police chief, Benazir Ahmed, who has a long history of employment with the UN.
The UN Committee against Torture recommended that the Bangladesh government “establish an independent vetting procedure, with appropriate UN guidance, for all military and police personnel proposed for deployment in UN peace missions and ensure that no person or unit implicated in the commission of torture, extrajudicial killing, disappearances or other serious human rights violations is selected for service.”
“The deployment of members of the RAB in peacekeeping operations reinforces a message that grave human rights abuses will not preclude one from service under the UN flag and increases the chances of human rights abuses being committed in UN missions,” said Louis Charbonneau, United Nations director at Human Rights Watch.
“The UN should send a clear signal to host and troop-contributing countries that abusive units will not be part of the UN.”
The organisations that signed the letter are: Amnesty International, Asian Federation Against Involuntary Disappearances (AFAD), Asian Forum for Human Rights and Development (FORUM-ASIA),
Asian Human Rights Commission, Asian Network for Free Elections (ANFREL), Capital Punishment Justice Project, CIVICUS: World Alliance for Citizen Participation, Human Rights Watch, International Federation for Human Rights, Robert F Kennedy Human Rights, The Advocates for Human Rights, and World Organization Against Torture (OMCT).
