Digital Security Act is the ‘ghost’ of BAKSAL: Rizvi

The BNP has described the Digital Security Act passed in parliament as the “ghost” of an authoritarian single party system.

“In order to gag the people of Bangladesh and the media, the controversial Digital Security Act passed in parliament without people’s representatives,” BNP's Senior Joint Secretary General Ruhul Kabir Rizvi said at a media briefing on Thursday.

“The law goes against the constitution because it has undermined the fundamental rights enshrined in the constitution: freethinking, freedom of speech, freedom of expression and freedom of the media,” he said.

“This black law is nothing but the ghost of BAKSAL.”

BAKSAL that stands for Bangladesh Krishak Sramik Awami League founded in 1975 by Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman envisaged a system aiming to achieve an exploitation-free and socialist economic and administrative order. But the single-party system created a lot of misgivings in some circles of the bureaucracy, army and civil society at the time.

The BNP leader, Rizvi, urged the people of freethinking to stand against the “black law”.

On Wednesday, the parliament passed the Digital Security Act 2018 by dropping the much criticised Section 57 of the ICT Act and some other parts.

Many concerns that it will curb the freedom of expression by obstructing journalism, however, remain as some parts of the ICT Act have been kept in the new law.

Many issues of the Section 57, however, have been added to different sections of the new Act.

The law was designed to scuttle the media coverage of government corruption, according to Rizvi. 

The law enables law-enforcement agencies to raid news publishers’ offices, seize computers and arrest journalists without any warrant, he said.

“Ordinary people won’t be spared from the claws of the black law either,” he said.