THE Malaysian authorities should take action to end widespread workplace and police abuses of the migrant workers who make up more than 20 per cent of the country’s workforce, Amnesty International said in a report released on 24 March 2010.

Trapped: The Exploitation of Migrant Workers in Malaysia documents widespread abuses against migrant workers from eight South Asian and Southeast Asian countries who are lured to Malaysia by the promise of jobs but are instead used in forced labour or exploited in other ways.

Rubaiyat Rahman

TANNERY is one of those few most important sectors of our economy which contribute a lot to the export earnings. Beside its impact on our economy, we should not forget about the people whose lives are directly dependent on this industry. While we discuss about the environmental impact of tanneries and ways to reduce its pollution, we have to consider the lives of he people working there so that we can adopt a sustainable developmental approach in this field.

M. Jashim Ali Chowdhury

Mohammad Moin Uddin, an Assistant Professor of Law from Premier University Chittagong has come out with something new in our Preamble talk. The gist of his write-up in the last issue of Law and Our Rights, as it appeared to me, is that the substitution of ‘war’ in place of ’struggle’ in the Preamble was right as per the ‘grammatical construction’ of the relevant phrase. To the author it was the correction of the mistake of ‘inappropriate’ use of a ‘right word in a wrong place’. Bless my soul!

Dr. Mizanur Rahman and S. M. Masum Billah

Given the limited number of international criminal tribunals and their scarce resources, war crimes prosecution by national courts seems to assume ever more importance. Bangladesh was the pioneer in formulating first national war crimes law in the history of the world back in 1973, spirit of which was later inculcated in the ICC statute, can again become an example of effective national prosecution of war crimes with a blend of national and international criminal jurisprudence. The case of Sierra Leone, Dili, Cambodia, and Lebanon experiences with suitable compatibility may be the torch bearer for Bangladesh.