July 28, 2026
Access Now
Amnesty International
ARTICLE 19
CIVICUS: World Alliance for Citizen Participation
Fortify Rights
Human Rights Watch
Robert & Ethel Kennedy Human Rights Center
Tech Global Institute
We welcome the commitments expressed by the Government of the People’s Republic of Bangladesh to advance legal, institutional, and governance reforms as part of Bangladesh’s political transition. This reform agenda presents an important opportunity to address one of the most consequential legacies of the past sixteen years: the unchecked expansion of surveillance and interception capabilities across state institutions.
During the previous administration, surveillance powers and technologies were significantly expanded across military, intelligence, and civilian law-enforcement structures, often without meaningful transparency, independent oversight, or effective accountability mechanisms. Human rights defenders, civil society actors, journalists, activists, and opposition figures were among those targeted. In fact, members of your own party, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, were among those subjected to such surveillance and interception.
In your election manifesto, Bangladesh Before All, you pledged to strengthen accountability and uphold the rule of law across every level of the state, as well as to restore professionalism and discipline within law enforcement and intelligence agencies, and undertake legislative reforms to prevent the re-emergence of authoritarian governance. These commitments, should they be fulfilled, will rebuild public trust, strengthen state institutions, and safeguard fundamental rights.
To help prevent future grave abuses and ensure civil rights are fostered, we urge you to undertake a comprehensive reform of Bangladesh’s legal framework and institutional practices on surveillance, interception, and other investigative powers. As the Government pursues a wider programme of institutional reform, this is vital to ensure that intelligence-gathering and investigative powers remain effective for legitimate public purposes while being subject to robust safeguards, independent oversight, and respect for human rights.
EVIDENCE OF THE SCALE AND IMPACT OF SURVEILLANCE AND INTERCEPTION PRACTICES IN BANGLADESH WARRANTS URGENT ATTENTION
Since 2024, reporting and investigations have revealed the extent to which surveillance capabilities have been institutionalised across state agencies over the past decade. One investigative report by Tech Global Institute documented the procurement and deployment of extensive interception, monitoring, and data-analysis capabilities across military, intelligence, and civilian law-enforcement bodies, with public expenditure approaching at least US$ 190 million between 2015 and 2025. Around the same time, The Daily Star reported that the former government spent at least US$ 120 million on surveillance infrastructure between 2016 and 2024. Following publication of these reports in August 2025, the interim government reportedly established a high-powered committee to review the procurement and use of surveillance technologies, which submitted its findings to Chief Adviser Professor Muhammad Yunus on February 10, 2026. To date, however, that report has not been made public. An amendment to the telecommunications law was also passed and published in the gazette before the committee could submit its recommendations, suggesting that its findings did not inform the legislative changes.
Moreover, the concerns raised by these investigations are reinforced by the findings of the United Nations’ Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights in its Fact Finding Report on Human Rights Violations and Abuses Related to the Protests of July and August 2024 in Bangladesh. The report described a surveillance and intelligence architecture that had expanded far beyond traditional national-security functions and was deeply integrated into the repression of civil and political rights by the military and police. It found that agencies shared surveillance-derived intelligence to monitor private communications and identify perceived critics and dissidents, as well as to enable abduction, arbitrary arrests and detention, intimidation, interference with medical treatment, the suppression of protests, and enforced disappearances. It further found that these institutions operated under the direct authority of senior executive office holders without institutionalised parliamentary or independent oversight.
The expansion of surveillance architectures is an ongoing concern. According to reports, as recently as May 2026, the Government has approved a procurement valued at approximately BDT 94.95 crore for the National Telecommunication Monitoring Centre, which includes technologies capable of monitoring, filtering, and blocking online content and managing large-scale network traffic across data centres. At the same time, the 2026-27 national budget allocated BDT 73,640 crore collectively to the Ministry of Home Affairs, Ministry of Defence, and Armed Forces Division, constituting 7.85% of the total national budget. While budgetary support for national security institutions is necessary, limited public information is available regarding how resources dedicated to surveillance, interception, and related technological capabilities will be procured, supervised, and subjected to appropriate accountability mechanisms. These details must be disclosed in a transparent manner to ensure effective oversight and prevent the further expansion of systems that could be used to undermine human rights.
We are deeply concerned that Bangladesh’s surveillance and interception architecture remains extensive, technologically sophisticated, and institutionally entrenched, without the significant legal, procedural, institutional, and oversight safeguards necessary to prevent misuse.
LEGAL AND INSTITUTIONAL SAFEGUARDS NECESSARY TO PREVENT MISUSE HAVE NOT EVOLVED AT THE SAME PACE
During the interim administration, the Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulation (Amendment) Ordinance, 2026 was adopted, representing an important, albeit incomplete, step towards reform. While far from satisfactory, it sought to move beyond the previous model of broadly framed surveillance and interception powers by introducing greater procedural structures and safeguards. However, the subsequent enactment of the Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulation (Amendment) Act, 2026 by your government removed many of those structures and safeguards, and expanded the discretion available to authorities exercising these highly intrusive powers. Specifically, while section 97A retained surveillance and interception powers, it removed or significantly diluted much of the rights-oriented language, accountability and oversight architecture, procedural specificity, and transparency provisions that had been included in the ordinance. Moreover, the amended statute continues to preserve the role of the National Telecommunication Monitoring Centre, despite the absence of a clear public-facing statutory mandate, independent oversight mechanism, or transparency framework governing its operations. As a result, surveillance and interception powers remain broad, while many of the checks and balances intended to regulate their use have been significantly weakened. Consequently, the current framework continues to empower regulatory, intelligence, national-security, investigative, and law-enforcement agencies to conduct surveillance and interception as well as issue binding directions to service providers, while offering limited opportunities to challenge the legality, necessity, proportionality, or scope of such measures before an independent authority.
At the same time, the Personal Data Protection Act, 2026 provides extensive exemptions to data privacy to state authorities on overbroad grounds including national security, defence, public order, public interest, and criminal investigations. When read together with the National Data Management Act, 2026, including proposed interoperability and centralised database integration frameworks and potential localisation requirements, these measures create significant uncertainty regarding the future governance of personal data, and in particular the safeguards against excessive state access to sensitive information. Cumulatively, the effect is not only to enable the collection, aggregation, sharing, and retention of people’s personal data across government systems, but also to facilitate potential surveillance under the telecommunications legal and regulatory frameworks without corresponding guarantees of independent scrutiny or effective redress.
We recognise that legitimate public interests, including the prevention of terrorism, investigation of serious crime, protection of national security, and safeguarding of public safety, may require intelligence-gathering and investigative powers. However, effective security and respect for fundamental rights are not competing objectives — they are mutually reinforcing. Currently, the framework permits intrusive surveillance and interception, while falling short of international laws and standards of legality, accountability, due process, transparency, and protection against arbitrary interference with privacy and freedom of expression.
RECOMMENDATIONS
More than five months have passed since your government assumed office in February 2026. During this period, some steps have been taken across several reform priorities. Yet there has been little public indication of a broader review of Bangladesh’s surveillance, interception, and intelligence-governance framework, which raises serious concerns given the significance of the issue and the findings that have emerged over the past two years.
Given the stated commitment of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party to institutional accountability and the prevention of future abuses of state power, we respectfully urge the Government to undertake the following non-exhaustive list of reforms:
1. Establish an independent legislative reform commission to conduct a comprehensive review of all existing laws, regulations, and executive instruments that directly or indirectly enable surveillance and interception. The commission should — in consultation with stakeholders, including civil society — identify provisions requiring amendment or repeal to ensure compliance with judicial precedents and international human rights obligations, as well as make recommendations on the substance and institutional design of a new statutory framework governing surveillance and interception. Its review should cover both targeted and bulk surveillance powers, including interception, access to stored data, and digital monitoring, and publish its findings and recommendations within a defined timeframe. Additionally, the Government should also publish the report of the high-powered committee established to review the procurement and use of surveillance technologies that was submitted to the interim administration.
2. Enact a clear, narrowly tailored, rights-respecting, and publicly accessible legal framework governing all forms of surveillance and interception, as well as other investigatory powers involving information access and compelled disclosure. Rather than amend the existing telecommunication regime that currently enables surveillance and interception, a new law should be introduced to regulate the full lifecycle of surveillance powers and technologies — including deployment, operational use, data access, retention, sharing, oversight, and redress — grounded in international laws and best practices, including the principles of legality, necessity, and proportionality, to ensure the protection of fundamental human rights such as the right to privacy. Surveillance powers should be created only through primary legislation and not through rules, regulations, licensing conditions, or other secondary instruments, and overbroad immunities for surveillance and interception-related abuses should be repealed.
3. Introduce clear provisions in the above legal framework explicitly governing the import, transfer, procurement, and acquisition of intrusive surveillance and interception technologies, including dual-use systems. Given that Bangladesh is a net importing country, such controls are necessary to ensure that surveillance capacity is not expanded through opaque procurement practices or through technologies that are incompatible with international law or may infringe fundamental rights protected under Bangladesh’s Constitution. All import approvals should be subject to prior scrutiny by designated civilian authorities, informed by human rights due diligence, end-use declarations, and institutional necessity. The framework should require recordkeeping, human rights impact assessments, public disclosure of vendors and the general nature of procured capabilities, parliamentary reporting, and exclusion of technologies where there is a substantial risk of misuse, unlawful interception, or serious human rights harm.
4. Establish an effective judicial oversight mechanism.
All surveillance and interception measures should be subject to prior authorisation by an independent and competent judicial authority, except in narrowly defined emergency circumstances prescribed by law and subject to prompt ex post review. Such judicial approval should be based on detailed, evidence-based applications demonstrating probable cause, a legitimate aim, and compliance with necessity and proportionality requirements. Additionally, judicial oversight should extend beyond ex ante authorisation, empowering individuals to have access to effective post-surveillance remedies, including judicial review, suppression of unlawfully obtained evidence, sanctions against responsible officials, and compensation for rights violations.
5. Establish an independent and adequately resourced parliamentary oversight committee to periodically assess the surveillance and interception activities across both civilian and military agencies. Its mandate should extend to summoning officials, compelling the production of documents and contracts subject only to narrowly defined national security exceptions, assessing the legal basis and rights impacts of surveillance technologies and powers, reviewing procurement practices, conducting audits, and investigating potential abuses. It should also be empowered to recommend legislative reform, refer matters for judicial or regulatory action, and publish periodic public reports to strengthen accountability.
6. Exemptions to data privacy under the Personal Data Protection Act, 2026 for law enforcement, national security, or intelligence purposes should be narrowly drafted, precisely defined, and subject to robust safeguards against abuse. Such exemptions should not operate as blanket carve-outs that authorise unrestricted access to personal data, undermine data protection principles, or displace protections under international law and Bangladesh’s Constitution. The statute should also establish clear procedural safeguards for surveillance, interception, and access involving locally stored data, including device searches, compelled disclosure, access to cloud backups, and extraction of data from phones, computers, and other digital devices, with prior judicial authorisation, scope limitations, data minimisation requirements, retention limits, and avenues for challenge and redress.
We respectfully urge the Government to undertake urgent reforms that balance national security concerns with human rights and freedoms. A transparent and consultative process involving regulators, policymakers, civil society organisations, academia, technical experts, service providers, and affected communities would significantly enhance the legitimacy, effectiveness, and durability of any reform effort.
We remain ready to engage constructively and would welcome the opportunity to contribute to a reform process grounded in legality, accountability, transparency, and respect for human rights.
