Institutional Abuse and Accountability: Global Justice Movements and South Asian Impact

When Institutions Become the Threat: Accountability Movements and the South Asian Test

In the summer of 2024, Bangladeshi students took to the streets to protest a government quota system. Within weeks, what began as a narrow administrative grievance had become the largest mass uprising in the country's history — and by August 5, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina had fled to India. The United Nations Fact-Finding Mission that followed documented up to 1,400 killings between July 1 and August 15, 2024, characterized the crackdown as "a calculated and well-coordinated strategy by the former government to hold onto power," and stated that further investigation was needed into possible crimes against humanity.

What happened in Bangladesh in 2024 was not an anomaly. It was the culmination of a well-documented pattern: institutions designed to protect citizens — police, judiciary, security forces — repurposed over years into instruments of political control. When institutions become the source of abuse, the question of accountability is not merely legal. It is existential. And across South Asia, that question is being asked, with varying degrees of urgency and very different results.

The Pattern That Never Changes

Bangladesh's crisis was built over fifteen years. Human Rights Watch documented a systematic process under the Hasina government: enforced disappearances, extrajudicial killings, arbitrary arrests, surveillance, and torture — deployed consistently against critics, opposition members, journalists, and civil society. Security forces were not rogue actors operating against official policy; they were instruments of official policy. One police officer told Human Rights Watch that loyalty to the Awami League was "often prioritized over merit for lucrative postings," leading police to become "increasingly biased, acting more like party cadres over the years."

The Police Act of 1861 — a piece of British colonial legislation designed to enforce state authority rather than serve the public — remains Bangladesh's foundational law governing law enforcement. Human Rights Watch has identified its reform as core to any meaningful accountability effort, noting that its hierarchical structure "precludes genuine civilian oversight." A law written by colonial administrators to suppress a subject population is still governing a democracy's relationship with its own citizens. This is the architecture of institutional abuse: structures that outlast the governments that exploit them.

The numbers from 2025 demonstrate how durable these structures are. Ain o Salish Kendra (ASK), one of Bangladesh's leading human rights organizations, documented 35 people killed in extrajudicial violence by state forces between January and October 2025 — under the interim government that came to power promising accountability. In the same period, 28 people died in custody. Most disturbingly: 165 people were killed by mob lynching, a figure that reflects not the violence of the state but the collapse of public trust in it. When communities believe the justice system cannot offer them recourse, they take justice into their own hands — and the results are predictably catastrophic.

The Accountability Architecture: Promises and Gaps

Bangladesh's interim government, led by Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus, has made accountability a central commitment. It has established a commission to investigate enforced disappearances, dropped many politically motivated cases filed by the previous administration, demanded an end to extrajudicial killings, and set up six reform commissions covering the electoral system, justice system, public administration, police, anti-corruption office, and the constitution. In October 2024, the International Crimes Tribunal issued arrest warrants for former Prime Minister Hasina and others for their alleged roles in "massacres, killings, and crimes against humanity" during the protests.

Yunus himself described inheriting a "completely broken-down" system of public administration and justice. The government's White Paper on the State of the Economy, published in December 2024, estimated that corruption under the previous government cost Bangladesh approximately $234 billion over fifteen years — funds that could have transformed public infrastructure, education, and healthcare.

But the gap between commitment and structural change is wide and is being watched closely. Amnesty International has documented that mass arrests, political detentions, and the lack of accountability for security forces have continued despite promises of reform. Human Rights Watch reported that security forces have returned to targeting former Awami League supporters with the same abusive practices — arbitrary arrest, denial of due process, pressure on family members to sign complaints — that characterized the previous government's operations against opposition supporters. The pattern of abuse did not change with the change in government. The targets did.

The International Crimes Tribunal's amendments — which the interim government approved in November 2024 — have been criticized by international observers including the UN Fact-Finding Mission, which stated that UN agencies "cannot assist any criminal justice processes that permit capital punishment or that raise serious concerns about fair trial, due process or other relevant international human rights standards." The same institution that is meant to deliver accountability for past atrocities is being built in a way that may itself fail international standards of justice. This is the paradox at the heart of transitional justice everywhere: the institutions you are trying to hold accountable are the institutions you have to use to hold them accountable.

South Asia's Accountability Deficit: A Regional Pattern

Bangladesh's crisis is the most acute current example of a problem that runs across South Asia. The mechanisms connecting institutional abuse to impunity — politicized police, compromised judiciary, weak civilian oversight, laws designed to silence critics — are features of the regional governance landscape, not aberrations.

In India, the National Human Rights Commission faced an unprecedented downgrade by the Global Alliance of National Human Rights Institutions in 2024 over its lack of independence and failure to respond to systemic violations. REDRESS published a report documenting how India's police and security forces have normalized the use of torture and ill-treatment as routine law enforcement tools. India's National Crime Records Bureau recorded 445,256 incidents of crimes against women in 2022, with rape accounting for 31,516 reported cases — against a backdrop of well-documented institutional failures in investigation, prosecution, and support for survivors. Convictions in sexual assault cases in India remain notoriously low, with backlogs in the justice system measured in years.

The #MeToo movement that swept India in 2018 — and echoed across Bangladesh and Pakistan in the years following — demonstrated both the power and the limits of social accountability mechanisms operating outside formal institutions. Female lawyers in multiple South Asian countries established platforms to provide rapid assistance to survivors, creating networks that bypassed institutional indifference or hostility. But research has consistently shown that India's #MeToo movement remained concentrated among urban, educated, professional women — its reach constrained by digital divides, caste dynamics, and defamation laws that allowed accused men to sue survivors in courts that moved at their pace rather than justice's.

In Pakistan, institutional abuse follows comparable structural logic. Custodial torture, enforced disappearances in Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, security force operations conducted outside judicial oversight — these are documented features of Pakistani governance that successive governments have failed to address structurally. The question of who holds the security apparatus accountable in a country where the security apparatus holds decisive political power has no comfortable answer.

What Accountability Actually Requires

The academic and practitioner literature on transitional justice — the mechanisms societies use to address systematic past abuses — has accumulated decades of evidence about what works and what does not. Bangladesh, at this particular moment, is navigating every major tension that literature identifies.

Truth without justice is incomplete. A UN fact-finding mission that establishes what happened, without a domestic or international judicial process that holds specific perpetrators accountable, produces a historical record but not deterrence. Bangladesh's International Crimes Tribunal, for all its procedural weaknesses, is attempting to close this gap — and its outcome will shape whether future governments in Bangladesh calculate that atrocity carries personal consequences.

Structural reform without institutional culture change is insufficient. The reform of formal legal frameworks — the Police Act, the ICT Act, the constitutional provisions that concentrate executive power — is necessary but not sufficient. One mid-level police officer told Crisis Group in 2024 that little had changed inside the force despite senior-level personnel replacements: the culture of compliance with political direction, the expectation of impunity, the distrust between citizens and law enforcement, these do not dissolve with new appointment letters.

Civil society is the accountability infrastructure that governments cannot build for themselves. Bangladesh's human rights organizations — ASK, Odhikar, BLAST — provide the independent documentation of abuses that creates the evidentiary basis for accountability claims. Their continued operation, free from harassment and interference, is not peripheral to the accountability project. It is central. The Yunus government's commitment to press freedom and civil society space will be tested by exactly this: whether organizations that document uncomfortable realities about the current government are afforded the same protection as organizations that documented uncomfortable realities about the previous one.

International accountability mechanisms matter as a backstop, not a substitute. The UN Fact-Finding Mission, the potential ICC referral discussed in Bangladesh's post-uprising moment, the UN Human Rights Council monitoring process — these exist precisely because domestic institutions are, by definition, compromised in the situations where accountability is most needed. For Bangladesh to refer its situation to the ICC or to support robust UN monitoring would be an act of genuine institutional confidence: an acknowledgment that external accountability strengthens rather than threatens legitimate governance.

The Window That Is Open — and How Long It Stays Open

Bangladesh's national elections are tentatively scheduled for early 2026. In the months between now and that election, the country faces what BRAC's Institute of Governance and Development describes as the question of whether it can "escape the trap of managed democracy" — a system in which elections occur but accountability does not, in which institutional forms coexist with institutional abuse because those with power to change the system benefit from its continuation.

The reform commissions established by the Yunus government have generated recommendations. Six months of transition have produced institutional analysis of genuine depth. But as BRAC researchers note, "reform has become a buzzword in Bangladeshi politics since the uprising, but little has translated into meaningful institutional change." Mid-level officials have been transferred. Senior abusers have been charged. The institutions themselves have not yet been rebuilt.

The global accountability movements of the past decade — #MeToo, Black Lives Matter, the various anti-corruption uprisings from Brazil to South Korea — have demonstrated something important: social mobilization can expose institutional abuse at scale and create moments of genuine political possibility. What those movements have also demonstrated is that moments of possibility close. The window in which the political cost of accountability is lower than the political cost of continuation does not stay open indefinitely.

Bangladesh's Monsoon Revolution of 2024 created a window. What happens inside it — whether the country builds independent courts, civilian oversight of security forces, freedom of expression, and genuine rule of law, or whether it replicates the structures of the previous regime under new management — will determine not just whether Bangladesh gets justice for the 1,400 people killed in the summer of 2024. It will determine whether the next generation of Bangladeshis grows up in a country where institutions protect citizens, or in one where institutions are weapons against them.

That is not a question only Bangladesh is asking. It is the defining institutional question of South Asia, and it does not have an easy answer.

fr24news is a wintk publication. This article was produced by our editorial team for investigative journalism and analytical purposes. All data cited is sourced from publicly available human rights documentation.