Continuing the Colonial Legacy in the Legislative Drafting in Bangladesh: Impact on the Legal Consciousness and the Rule of Law and Human Rights

The Paper is an in-depth study of the practices prevalent in Bangladesh regarding law making and people's perception as to legal sanctions resulting from such laws bearing colonial resemblance.The critical analysis focuses on the relation between how the common people perceive law in their public life and its impact in the long run upon the realization of human rights in a developing country.In doing so, the Paper draws upon historical discourse on colonial codification, scrutinizes the existing colonial drafting patterns followed by the law makers in independent Bangladesh, and argues that colonial drafting patterns impede the development of legal consciousness in public life.The Paper also analyses the Bangladeshi attitudes towards compliance as well as non-compliance with law especially focusing on the popular tendency of widespread indifference towards legal sanctions.Taking the Law of Torts, which is highly underdeveloped in Bangladesh, as an example, the Paper shows how lack of legal consciousness breeds impunity leading to a culture of disrespect to human rights. Introduction:Ensuring and protecting human rights is a challenge.But for a developing country, with a strong presence of a weak rule of law, the challenge is even bigger.Poor rule of law can be sustained by a general disregard for the laws and regulations by citizens (and often by the law enforcement mechanism).But that leads to the question of how does this attitude begin?One plausible indicator may lie in the relationship of law, legal system and society.When the legal system is wrought with dysfunctional laws unable to accomplish their purpose, people start disregarding that law.This non-functionality creates a cycle of rights abuse caused by and resulting in weak rule of law.The paper discusses how such a cycle is currently operating in Bangladesh.In this context, the paper hypothesizes that the dysfunctional laws in Bangladesh are a result of its colonial drafting and law-making process.Colonial drafting pattern creates laws with colonial traits which cater to the executive, cannot ensure accountability and creates a social a t t i t u d e of * Lecturer of Law, University of Dhaka, Bangladesh.The author is a graduate of Harvard Law School.She focuses on the interconnection between socio-economic and cultural rights and religious discourse.The author has resorted to historical and doctrinal methods, critical analogy and socio-legal analysis .She has conducted comparative case analysis from various concerned jurisdiction to illustrate my arguments.This is not an empirical study.It is a critical analysis of the existing legal norms from a interpretative and descriptive perspective.The observations and statements made in this Paper about the Drafting Wing, the Drafters and the Drafting process are not those of the author, but have been derived from the interviews with Executive officials on the condition of anonymity.