HUMAN rights violations at the hands of law enforcement agencies were expected to completely stop in the changed political context, but that has not been the case. Since the interim government was installed in August 2024, as Ain O Salish Kendra report, at least 35 people have become victims of extrajudicial killing, which is higher than the number of similar death during the last year of the Awami League government. Another rights organisation, Odhikar, also reports that at least 29 people fell victim to extrajudicial killings from August 2024 to June 30, 2025. There are allegations that the joint forces deployed to restore law and order were involved in a number of cases of extrajudicial killings. The inspector general of police has, however, said that they have no data on extrajudicial killings, which is alarmingly familiar because denial was also the rhetoric of the fallen regime. The government should know that the continued abuse of power by the law enforcement agencies cannot establish the rule of law and, therefore, it should take extraordinary measures to materialise its promises of zero tolerance of extrajudicial killing, enforced disappearances and custodial torture.
The cases of custodial torture during the tenure of the interim government marked a decline but are still significant, considering that the goal is to prevent any death in custody. On September 15, two people were found dead in the custody of the Rapid Action Battalion in Sylhet and the Police Bureau of Investigation in Moulvibazar. In February, the joint forces cited a 鈥榞unfight鈥� at Mohammadpur in Dhaka where two young people were killed, echoing incidents from previous years that were often discredited by rights groups. The continuation of custodial death and extrajudicial killing under ambiguous circumstances, a violently repressive tendency that characterised the fallen regime, suggests that the institutional machinery that enabled such abuses remains intact. The interim government has formed the Commission of Inquiry on Enforced Disappearances and the police administrative reforms commission to investigate past abuses and make recommendations for reforms, but without ensuring credible investigations of all allegations of rights violations and legal accountability of the perpetrators, it is not possible to break the cycle of impunity that errant law enforcers have enjoyed for decades.
The interim government was installed in the aftermath of an uprising with promises for dismantling the authoritarian structure and reorienting state power towards democratic accountability. The recurrence of extrajudicial killing and custodial death not only undermines the promises but also spells out a failure to break from coercive methods of the previous regime. The government must give clear directives and ensure transparent investigation or effect institutional reforms to end extrajudicial killings.
