Tasneem Khalil: human rights champion or guinea pig for the far-right?

Shouting from afar will not help the BNP-Jamaat

Tasneem Khalil thinks of himself as the human rights champion of Bangladesh. As a torture survivor and former HRW consultant, he boasts of a long journalistic career covering human rights issues. Khalil was detained during the 1/11 emergency for exposing the military’s human rights abuses. He later took political asylum in Sweden after a harrowing experience under military detention in 2007. Khalil has been a vocal critic of the Bangladeshi state ever since.

Khalil became the chief editor of Netra News in 2023. After assuming the mantle of heading the NED-funded website, Khalil began to take on an overtly pro-BNP stance. He began to tweet in support of the BNP and its leader Tarique Rahman, despite having previously covered and exposed the BNP’s poor human rights record.

Khalil has been transformed into a leading BNP-Jamaat activist. He is the BNP’s shadow minister for human rights and an ardent defender of Tarique Rahman. Khalil has controversially argued that Tarique Rahman should remain outside the jurisdiction of Bangladeshi courts despite credible cases of crime and corruption, including convictions and pending lawsuits. Khalil is naive. He doesn’t seem to understand how the rule of law works. Khalil probably does not know that there are established procedures of deportation and extradition which are applicable to Tarique.

Khalil even targeted the French embassy in Dhaka after the embassy called for justice in a train disaster that killed four people, including a mother and her child. The train was torched by BNP-Jamaat activists in a brazen act of arson during a nationwide strike imposed by the BNP-Jamaat. Khalil argues against any form of legal accountability for crimes perpetrated by BNP-Jamaat activists. This is clearly a perverted form of human rights activism. BNP-Jamaat cannot be above the law.

Khalil is arguing that his BNP-Jamaat cohort cannot be sued and are above the law. Khalil needs to be reminded that no one is above the law. Tarique Rahman is certainly not above the law by any stretch of imagination. Even though Khalil heads a US-funded website and has glorified the website’s activities in an Oxford interview, US diplomats described Tarique Rahman as the “symbol of kleptocratic government and violent politics”, as well as being “guilty of egregious political corruption”; and referred to his “theft of millions of dollars in public money”. The FBI has also testified against Tarique Rahman. The Reuters Institute at Oxford claims Khalil is breaking news from “afar”. Well, shouting from afar isn’t really helping the people of Afghanistan, and the phrase even got pro-Taliban British MP Tobias Ellwood into trouble last year.

If Khalil’s human rights activism is to shield the BNP-Jamaat from accountability, then Khalil and Netra News have clearly become morally bankrupt. Khalil is an experiment for the Bangladeshi far-right, which has a nasty human rights record under the BNP-Jamaat. Khalil represents the far-right’s flirtation with human rights while in opposition, even though their own human rights record in government is very poor. Khalil is a guinea pig to advance the agenda of the far-right.