Recent human rights reports state that around 59 members of the Bawm community remain in jail in Bangladesh without trial. Earlier, more than 120 Bawm men, women, and even children were detained during the 2024 to 2025 crackdown. Some have since been released on bail, but dozens are still behind bars.
Community sources and rights groups argue that these individuals were not arrested for any proven criminal act. They say the detentions are politically motivated and disproportionately target people simply because they belong to the Bawm ethnic minority.
There is a particular cruelty to not knowing. Not knowing when the hearing will be. Not knowing whether the evidence even exists. Not knowing, after months and then years, whether anyone on the outside is still fighting for you. For a significant number of people from the Bawm community in Bangladesh’s Chittagong Hill Tracts, this is not a hypothetical. This is daily life, played out behind bars, without trial, without resolution, without end in sight.
Years pass, Hearings are postponed, Families fall apart, And nothing changes
The Bawm are one of the smaller indigenous communities in the hill districts of Bandarban and Rangamati. They have, for generations, lived at the margins of economic and political life in Bangladesh. They have limited access to state services, limited representation in institutions, and limited recourse when things go wrong. What is now unfolding in the courts, or rather failing to unfold, is a continuation of that marginalization in a far more acute and damaging form.
Pre-trial detention is supposed to be exceptional. It exists for genuine cases where someone poses a flight risk or a danger, and where the state has credible reason to believe a crime has been committed. It is not meant to be a holding pattern that stretches on indefinitely while cases sit untouched and hearings are scheduled and cancelled and scheduled again. When detention becomes that, it stops being a precautionary measure and becomes something else entirely. It becomes punishment without conviction. It becomes a verdict handed down before any evidence is tested.
The punishment, in these cases, has arrived long before the verdict
Bangladesh is not without legal safeguards. The Constitution guarantees the right to a speedy trial. International human rights standards to which Bangladesh is a signatory are unambiguous. Pre-trial custody must be the exception and must be regularly reviewed by courts. Prosecutors must be held to account for presenting evidence in a timely way. Where the case cannot be made, the person must be released. These are not idealistic demands. They are basic legal obligations.
Yet for Bawm detainees, those obligations appear to have been suspended in practice, whatever the position in law. And when that happens in a democracy, when the protection exists on paper but fails a specific group of people in the real world, we have to ask honestly why. We have to consider whether these detentions would have dragged on as long if the people concerned were from a different community, living in a different part of the country.
When law protects everyone in theory but fails the same people again and again, the pattern is the message
The security challenges of the Chittagong Hill Tracts are not imaginary. The region has a complex history, and the state has both the right and the responsibility to enforce the law and respond to violence. None of that is in dispute. What is in dispute is whether indefinite detention without trial is an appropriate tool in that effort. It is not. It is counterproductive. It deepens precisely the alienation it claims to address. It tells communities that the law is not for them.
The damage does not stay inside prison walls. When a significant number of members of a small, tightly knit community disappear into the system for years at a time, the fear spreads outward. Families stop speaking openly. Communities withdraw. Trust in state institutions, already fragile in the hill tracts, erodes further. This is not a side effect to be tolerated in the name of security. It is a direct consequence that makes the situation worse.
Fear does not stay behind bars. It travels home with every family that visits and leaves empty-handed
Bangladesh was born from a struggle for dignity and rights. The country knows, from its own founding story, what it feels like when the machinery of power is used against a people rather than for them. That history imposes a responsibility. It demands that we look honestly at what is happening in the hill tracts and call it what it is. A failure of due process that is leaving real people, from a real community, in a legal void.
The government has it within its power to act. Cases can be expedited. Hearings can be held. Independent legal observers can be permitted access. Where evidence does not exist or cannot be produced, people must be released. None of this weakens the state. Quite the opposite. A state that applies the law fairly and consistently, even in difficult regions, even for small and unpopular communities, is a stronger state, not a weaker one.
What Is Happening to the Bawm Is Ethnic Cleansing
According to the 2022 census of Bangladesh, the Bawm population in the country is only about 13,193, living mainly in the Chittagong Hill Tracts. Recent reports suggest that due to conflict, security operations, and fear of persecution, roughly 3,500–4,000 Bawm people have already fled across the borders to India and Myanmar. For such a small community, this level of displacement is deeply alarming. Like many religious and ethnic minorities in Bangladesh, the Bawm have long faced structural marginalization, but their situation now appears even more precarious. When a vulnerable Indigenous community is detained in large numbers, pushed out of its homeland, and left without meaningful protection or justice, the question inevitably arises whether these developments amount to more than isolated security measures. For many observers, the pattern increasingly resembles the early signs of ethnic cleansing, where pressure, fear, and displacement gradually erase a community from its own land.
Upholding the Rule of Law is not a concession to anyone. It is what separates justice from force
Civil society has a role to play here too. Legal aid organizations, human rights groups, journalists, and citizens who care about the kind of country Bangladesh wants to be should be paying attention to what is happening in the Chittagong Hill Tracts and saying so clearly and loudly.
A nation’s moral standing is revealed not in how it treats those who are comfortable and connected, but in how it treats those who have neither. The Bawm people are waiting, in the most literal sense possible, for Bangladesh to decide what kind of country it is. The answer cannot keep being delayed.
Parvez Hashem, Lawyer and Human Rights Defender
