Dhaka [Bangladesh], July 20 : Human Rights Watch (HRW) has asked Bangladesh authorities to immediately comply with a July 12, 2026, court order to investigate the alleged disappearance of 30-year-old Miraj Sheikh, who was last seen in the custody of the Coast Guard.
According to a statement released by Human Rights Watch (HRW) on Monday, this appears to be the first known enforced disappearance case in two years. The rights group added that the government should reverse its decision to scrap reforms aimed at preventing enforced disappearances and instead ensure accountability by security forces.
Under the previous government, which was toppled by protests in 2024, enforced disappearances became endemic. This led the interim government, which governed Bangladesh between August 2024 and the elections in February 2026, to adopt the National Human Rights Commission Ordinance in November 2025.
The ordinance provided for independent investigations of enforced disappearances and granted the power to inspect any detention facility without requiring a court order.
However, the newly elected Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) government allowed the ordinance to expire. It has instead proposed a new law that would bar the Human Rights Commission from investigating alleged rights violations by security forces.
"Thousands of people were subjected to enforced disappearance during Sheikh Hasina's 15-year rule, and this latest case shows that without genuine reforms they can happen again," said Meenakshi Ganguly, deputy Asia director at Human Rights Watch.
"It is clear that these practices have become entrenched in Bangladeshi security agencies, and the new government, which has pledged reform, should ensure safeguards, institutional reforms, and accountability," Ganguly added.
Under international law, an enforced disappearance is defined as the detention or abduction of a person by state forces, or persons acting on their authority, followed by the authorities' refusal to acknowledge the deprivation of liberty or reveal the person's whereabouts or situation.
In August 2024, Bangladesh's interim government acceded to the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance, which requires states to criminalise, investigate, and prosecute the practice.
On the night of April 10, 2026, multiple witnesses reportedly saw Coast Guard officers detain Miraj Sheikh, a fisherman, in Joymonir Ghol, near the Sundarbans forest in Mongla, before taking him away by speedboat.
The following day, his family went to the Coast Guard office in Digraj, Mongla. They were initially told he was "on an operation" and advised to return that afternoon. When they did, the Coast Guard informed them that he had never been there, HRW stated.
On April 21, the owner of the tea stall where Sheikh was allegedly seized, and where his motorcycle had been left, said a man identifying himself as a Coast Guard member came to the shop, unlocked the motorcycle, and took it away. The tea stall owner noted that Coast Guard personnel returned the vehicle the following day.
"The witnesses explained the situation and time of disappearance, and how the Coast Guard members took him away," the family's lawyer, Muzahedul Islam Shahin, told Human Rights Watch.
Miraj's family has filed a complaint, held a news conference, and written to multiple government officials with no results. Following a habeas corpus petition filed by his father, the High Court on July 12 ordered law enforcement agencies to find the missing fisherman and produce him before the court within 15 days.
Lt. Cmdr. Mahbub Hossain, the media officer for the Coast Guard's Western Zone, has repeatedly denied detaining Miraj and told the media that they have no information about him.
This case appears to replicate abuses of the past. An interim government commission identified 1,569 cases of enforced disappearance between 2009 and 2024. Out of these, 1,282 people reappeared after periods of secret detention ranging from weeks to years.
At least 251 people never returned and are presumed dead, while the bodies of 36 others were recovered. The commission described this figure as a "substantial undercount."
A wide range of security forces were implicated in the disappearances, the commission found. These included two units of the police, the Detective Branch and the Counter Terrorism and Transnational Crime unit, as well as the paramilitary Rapid Action Battalion and the military intelligence agency, the Directorate General of Forces Intelligence.
The commission also found that the disappearances were accompanied by a "widespread and systematic culture of torture." It reported that "nearly every secret detention facility" contained specialised interrogation rooms equipped with torture devices. These included a "rotating chair," a "pulley system used to suspend people," devices used to administer electric shocks, and an instrument used to apply thermal torture, the statement said.
Among the most notorious cases of disappearances is that of Mir Ahmed Bin Quasem, often known as Armaan, a lawyer and son of an Islamist party leader who was executed in 2016.
Armaan was picked up by officials from the Rapid Action Battalion in August 2016, who held him in secret detention for eight years. He was released the day after the fall of the Awami League government on August 5, 2024. He stated that he "didn't see sunlight in eight years... It felt like I had been buried alive."
The circumstances of Armaan's detention form part of one of the trials at the International Crimes Tribunal, a domestic court trying cases of crimes against humanity. Ten serving army officers, who formerly held senior roles within the Rapid Action Battalion, are among those currently being prosecuted.
In another notorious case, a month before the 2014 national elections, 22 men involved in BNP politics were picked up over a two-week period from different parts of Dhaka and surrounding areas. Nineteen of them remain disappeared to this day.
There had been high expectations that a successor government would establish an independent body with the power to investigate such practices.
The interim government, led by Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus, promulgated two ordinances: the National Human Rights Commission Ordinance, 2025, and the Enforced Disappearance Prevention and Redress Ordinance, 2025. Together, these would have ensured an independent investigation of alleged disappearances with the possibility of referral to the International Crimes Tribunal.
However, the newly elected government allowed these ordinances to lapse. It has instead proposed laws under which the police would continue to investigate enforced disappearances, leaving the Human Rights Commission's only recourse to "call for a report from the chief of the force concerned or from the Government."
Under the proposed law, the government would also exercise greater influence over both the appointment of Human Rights Commission members and its rulemaking.
"The new government should amend its proposed legislation to remove any interference in the Human Rights Commission and to restore its authority to investigate enforced disappearances," Ganguly said.
"Allowing the police to investigate enforced disappearances will not ensure accountability and will not create the deterrence necessary to bring this practice to an end," she stated.