Drop the charges against Rozina Islam

The UN experts have recently called on the government to not "use the judiciary to chill critical reporting" and drop the charges against Rozina Islam, an investigative journalist of the daily Prothom Alo, as a case filed against her back in 2021 is still hanging over her head. Rozina was accused of "taking photos of official documents without permission" and charged under the Official Secrets Act, a law enacted by the British colonial administration in 1923, when she went to collect data from the health ministry in May 2021. 

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What message has journalist Rozina Islam’s imprisonment sent us?

Although the Dhaka Metropolitan Police (DMP) submitted its final probe report to the court on July 3, 2022, stating that no substantial evidence had been found to support the allegations against Rozina, she is yet to be acquitted in the case. What happened instead was, seven months later, the same court ordered the police to carry out further investigations into the case following a petition by the health ministry in January 2023. 

The prolongation of the investigation in the case is worrying. One can assume that it is being done with an aim to further harass the journalist concerned, suppress investigative journalism, and undermine press freedom in the country. The UN experts also raised the same concerns when they noted that "the protracted nature of Rozina Islam's case reflects a dangerous trend in Bangladesh and beyond to bring serious charges, often on unsubstantiated grounds, against journalists and editors and then leave the cases hanging unresolved in the judicial process as a way of threatening, intimidating, harassing, and silencing them." 

Shouldn't the government have taken action against the corrupt officials of the health ministry based on her reports, instead of framing her and harassing her for what she did? 

The questions that must be asked at this point are, should the law, under which Rozina Islam was sued, even exist at this age and be used against journalists? Doesn't it undermine people's right to information, as guaranteed under the Right to Information Act? What Rozina did was unearth corruption, mismanagement and irregularities in our health sector, particularly the irregularities in the procurement of emergency medical supplies during the pandemic. Didn't she do a great service to the nation through her investigative journalism? Shouldn't the government have taken action against the corrupt officials of the health ministry based on her reports, instead of framing her and harassing her for what she did? 

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A Law That Only Hurts

And Rozina is not the only one to be framed for doing her job; scores of journalists, editors, human rights defenders, political activists and others were framed under the obnoxious Digital Security Act (DSA) enacted in 2018. According to the Centre for Governance Studies (CGS), a total of 109 cases were filed under this draconian law between October 2018 and August 2022, in which 2,889 individuals were accused. Of them, only two percent saw their cases come to a close, with the court handing either a conviction, an acquittal or the dismissal of the case. What happened to the rest? They have been suffering indefinitely through prolonged investigation and trial processes. This must stop.

We call upon the government to drop the charges against Rozina Islam and withdraw all other protracted cases against journalists, editors, political activists and human rights defenders. We join the UN experts in urging them to also review the prosecution policy for journalists, the use of the colonial-era Official Secrets Act, as well as the Digital Security Act.