A Reform Rolled Back Within Months
On July 28, 2026, eight human rights organizations — Access Now, Amnesty International, ARTICLE 19, CIVICUS, Fortify Rights, Human Rights Watch, the Robert & Ethel Kennedy Human Rights Center, and Tech Global Institute — issued a joint statement accusing Bangladesh's government of gutting a surveillance-reform ordinance within months of its adoption (Tech Global Institute, Jul. 28, 2026). The target is the Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulation (Amendment) Act, 2026, which the groups say stripped "rights-oriented language, accountability and oversight architecture, procedural specificity, and transparency provisions" from the ordinance it superseded — while preserving sweeping interception powers under Section 97A with expanded governmental discretion.
The backstory matters. Bangladesh's interim administration, led by Chief Adviser Muhammad Yunus, gave final approval on December 24, 2025 to the Bangladesh Telecommunication (Amendment) Ordinance, 2025, after in-principle sign-off the previous month (BSS, Dec. 2025). That ordinance was a genuinely significant reform: it permanently banned internet and telecom shutdowns, restored BTRC's licensing autonomy from the ministry, made misuse of SIM and device-registration data a punishable offense, narrowed the catch-all "speech offence" clause to incitement of violence, and — centrally — abolished the National Telecommunication Monitoring Centre (NTMC) in favor of a Centre for Information Support that would provide only technical assistance for interception, subject to approval by a new quasi-judicial council and annual public reporting to Parliament.
That is the framework the joint statement says the 2026 Act unwound. The NTMC's role was preserved rather than retired, the rights groups say, "despite lacking a clear public-facing statutory mandate, independent oversight mechanism, or transparency framework." As of May 2026, the government had already approved roughly BDT 94.95 crore for NTMC equipment covering content monitoring, filtering, blocking, and large-scale traffic management — procurement that continued even as the ordinance nominally slated the body for replacement.
The Case the Government Isn't Fully Wrong About
It would be unfair to treat every element of the 2026 Act as bad faith. Lawful interception is not, by itself, illegitimate state power — every functioning democracy retains some capacity to intercept communications for counterterrorism, organized crime, and kidnapping-for-ransom cases where minutes matter. Bangladesh also faces genuine cross-border security threats, and a telecom regulator whose licensing decisions are perpetually second-guessed by rights litigation can struggle to attract the network investment the sector needs. A government elected on a law-and-order mandate has a plausible argument that a quasi-judicial pre-authorization council for every interception request could slow response to a live threat. That is a real tradeoff, not a fake one.
Why the Tradeoff Was Already Struck — and Reversed
But Bangladesh's own interim government already worked through that tradeoff and landed on an answer: keep interception, but route it through independent authorization and make its scope reportable. The 2025 ordinance did not ban surveillance; it constrained who could order it and required someone outside the executive to see the aggregate numbers once a year. Reversing that specific balance — keeping the power, discarding the constraint — is the part that should trouble anyone who cares about proportionate regulation rather than either extreme.
The joint statement's own framing sharpens the point: it notes that the letter is addressed to a government whose own party, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, had members surveilled under the prior sixteen-year administration. An interception apparatus with no independent authorization step is dangerous precisely because political control of the state changes — a lesson Bangladesh has now lived through twice in two years. Institutional safeguards outlast whichever party currently benefits from their absence; that is the entire argument for building them into statute rather than administrative discretion.
The six recommendations the rights groups issued are notably modest: an independent legislative reform commission, a standalone surveillance law rather than telecom-act amendments, human-rights review of interception-technology procurement, judicial authorization, a standing parliamentary oversight committee, and narrower data-privacy exemptions. None of these bar the state from investigating real threats. They ask that the constraints Bangladesh's own transitional government already drafted be kept rather than quietly written back out.
What Should Happen Next
Bangladesh does not need to choose between a functioning interception capability and independent oversight of it — the December 2025 ordinance proved both could coexist in the same statute. The 2026 Act's error was not retaining Section 97A; it was retaining the power while discarding the specific, already-drafted mechanisms — the quasi-judicial council, the annual parliamentary report, the SIM-data misuse penalty — that made that power answerable to something other than the ministry wielding it. Restoring those provisions, rather than relitigating whether interception should exist at all, is the narrowest fix available and the one most likely to survive the next change of government.