Please - Odhikar

Chapter 6
Other Major Achievements Made: Linkages and Networks
Dissemination of information relating to human rights abuses is crucial for awareness generation
among the people. It also helps in alerting the government of areas where improvement and
review are necessary. Odhikar, therefore, strongly believes in the power of the press and uses the
print media to highlight information collected during fact finding and monitoring activities.
The three years of work in the area of thana monitoring and fact finding and dissemination of
information, supported by the AED, has greatly benefited Odhikar, as it has been able to
contribute to some changes that the Government is planning to bring about in the area of law
enforcement and Criminal law.
As mentioned previously, as part of the AED-supported project activities, Odhikar held three
regional discussion meetings during the three project years of 2003, 2004, 2005. The key
objective was to have a comparative situation analysis of particular human rights issues in other
countries of the South Asian region and regional human rights organizations.
The three regional meetings helped Odhikar gather enough material to make comparative studies
and also enabled regional participants to take back information to use in their own programmes
and projects. Success stories were also shared, which could be replicated in other South Asian
countries. Bringing human rights advocates from South Asian countries to discuss, reflect and
recommend on particular human rights issues created additional support to civil society
consensus building behind important and relevant issues and helped formulate means and ways
by which advocacy with policymakers could be brought about.
The regional discussion meetings also facilitated the discovering of diversified perspectives of
particular human rights issues. It enriched the quality of research in all the participating
countries.
Linkages and Networks Formed as a result of the AED project:
Since Odhikar disseminated its findings in the local dailies and since the discussion meetings
were also used by Odhikar as a platform to highlight the results of its fact finding and
monitoring work, the state of law enforcement and related issues in Bangladesh were aired in a
public forum, where representatives of various Ministries, law enforcement and other
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