Freedom of Expression in Bangladesh: space for dissent closes down

We are delighted to introduce our 2017/18 Tomlinson lecture speaker, Sara Hossain.

Sara Hossain is a lawyer in the Supreme Court of Bangladesh and the Honorary Executive Director of Bangladesh Legal Aid Service Trust (BLAST). She has worked on a wide range of human rights issues, including campaigns for justice for Bangladesh garment industry workers. Globally, this issue gained greater contemporary visibility after the Rana Plaza tragedy of 2013. Interviewed for a 2013 Time article, Hossain remarked “This is not a wake-up call…This is like somebody sleeping in after the alarm has been ringing and ringing and ringing”.

She has also worked to address gender-based violence in Bangladesh. Alongside the women’s movement in Bangladesh, she fought for the country’s first comprehensive law on violence against women (2010), challenged how women’s integrity is questioned in rape cases, and sought to ban the discredited and traumatising ‘two-finger test’ in rape cases to determine whether rape victims are ‘habituated’ to sex, a British colonial legacy still in operation in Bangladesh (and India).

She is also well known for speaking spoken out in favour of freedom of expression for journalists and bloggers. A number of Bangladeshi journalists and bloggers have been murdered in recent years - three bloggers were killed in the first five months of 2015, more followed in 2016 - and secular bloggers have increasingly received death threats. Some have allegedly been targeted for opposing religious fundamentalists, another because they were the editor of Bangladesh’s first LGBTQ+ magazine.

You can read more about Sara Hossain here

The event will be followed by a drinks reception.