Char Dwellers’ Right to Development in Bangladesh

Abstract

This chapter examines life in the charlands of Bangladesh in the context of the 1986 Declaration on the Right to Development and the 1998 UN Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement. On the chars, the right to development remains starkly unfulfilled. Focusing on the poverty of the char communities, the broader components of equality, access to development and resources are used as a framework of analysis. The evidence reveals that underlying the poverty and high rate of inequality of the char communities are poor governance and a lack of structures, which facilitate self-determination. ‘Self-determination’ in this chapter means the power to make decisions and to have control and agency over one’s life, and not the legal right to self-government. These human rights concerns are compounded by the causes of people’s prior migration onto the chars. A principal driver of that migration has been exclusion from any benefits of development on the mainland, which also contravenes the Right to Development. From this perspective, the migrations that have populated the chars constitute displacement by human rights contravention, which is one of the grounds for recognizing char dwellers as Internally Displaced Persons. Accordingly, the Right to Development and the Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement jointly call for addressing shortfalls in development, health, education, and self-determining governance on the chars.