Impact Factor (JCC): 1.1947- This article can be downloaded from www.bestjournals.in EXTRA JUDICIAL KILLING: AN OVERVIEW OF BANGLADESH MOONMOON BINTA AZIZ Assistant Professor, Department of Criminology and Police Science, Mawlana Bhashani Science and Technology University, Santosh, Tangail, Bangladesh ABSTRACT In general, extrajudicial killing is the killing by law enforcement authorities without the sanction of any judicial proceeding or legal process. Though a person is being suspected as a criminal, he has the legal and constitutional right to have justice. In this paper it is tried to analyze five years (2005-2009) data from some newspapers articles of Bangladesh on extrajudicial killing, find the legal barriers as well as legal shields used by law enforcement agencies to justify the killings. It is also tried to explain extrajudicial killing by several aspects like denying due process, crime control and access to the justice on the basis of secondary data sources. KEYWORDS: Extra Judicial Killing, Human Rights, Legal Boundary, Justice System INTRODUCTION Civilization is thought to have come to a stage when people are supposedly living in a rights-based rational society. In order to consolidate their perceived and real gains in this respect, the State have to create useful laws and relevant institutions. Of the individual rights guaranteed within the constitutional framework of a state, some have been characterized as the most essential or fundamental to our existence as human race. These are universally regarded as birth rights and are inseparable from us, i.e., ‘inalienable’ of human being. Right to life, liberty, conscience, right to freedom of movement and speech, freedom from torture and inhuman treatment are agreed to be the pre-requisite for overall development of a human person including physical, mental, intellectual, cultural and spiritual development. Constraints put up by policies (of a state or informal institutions) on the way of accessing these rights would mean constraints in the process of development of human potentials of that particular nation or race. As a poor developing country, Bangladesh unfortunately faces a lot of such constraints. One of the major concerns of the country today seems to be violation of the fundamental rights and Human Rights of its citizens. Human rights refer to the ‘basic rights and freedoms to which all humans are entitled.’Examples of rights and freedoms which have come to be commonly thought of as human rights include civil and political rights, such as the right to life and liberty, freedom of expression, and equality before the law; and social, cultural and economic rights, including the right to participate in culture, the right to food, the right to work, and the right to education. In this paper it is concerned about the violation of life and liberty by the authorities who have to protect the right that means the law enforcement agencies. The barbaric practices of extra-judicial killings and custodial torture have existed and still exit in many countries of the world. In Bangladesh, these practices started right after the country’s independence and have continued till today, with different intensities at different times. The elite ‘RAB’ was formed by the last BNP government in 2004 to fight serious crimes along with the police forces. They were successful to some extent in their stated missions including the BEST: International Journal of Humanities, Arts, Medicine and Sciences (BEST: IJHAMS) ISSN (P): 2348-0521, ISSN (E): 2454-4728 Vol. 3, Issue 12, Dec 2015, 131-142 © BEST Journals