Click to expand Image Chief Advisor Muhammad Yunus (3rd L) visits three secret detention facilities known as "Ayna Ghor," which had been used as torture cells during the Awami League government's rule, Dhaka, Bangladesh, February 12, 2025. © 2025 Nayem Shaan/Drik/Getty Images On October 9, the Bangladesh authorities filed charges against 28 people for enforced disappearances, secret detention, and torture. It was a long time coming.A “smear campaign,” the home minister had scoffed in 2017, after Human Rights Watch released a report on secret detentions and enforced disappearances in Bangladesh. When I had met with him, the minister, Asaduzzaman Khan, had been dismissive, saying that most of the “disappeared” were criminals evading arrest, debt dodgers, or adulterers. He agreed to investigate at my insistence, but that never happened. During its time in office from 2009 to 2024, the Sheikh Hasina administration, of which Khan was a key member, became increasingly authoritarian. Our work on extrajudicial killings, torture, and suppression of speech was met with denials or false promises.The repression persisted until August 2024, when the Hasina government was toppled following three weeks of enraged protests in which 1,400 people were killed. Hasina, Khan, and several senior officials fled the country. An interim government, led by Muhammad Yunus, a Nobel peace laureate, came in promising reforms. It established a Commission of Inquiry on Enforced Disappearances, which received at least 1,850 complaints, and found that over 300 victims were presumed killed in custody. The commission recently released a documentary “Unfolding the Truth” describing its findings, including horrifying accounts of cruelty. Hasina and Khan were among those charged on October 9, as were several army officers, both former and serving.Among those in court when the charges were announced were people whose cases we had documented. One is Mir Ahmad Bin Quasem, or Armaan as he is called, who had chillingly written to me just days before his disappearance in 2016 that he was “worried” about his own safety. He was held for eight years in a secret military intelligence detention site, and was released after the Hasina government was deposed. Over those years, his wife would call me, desperate for news – the plight of so many families of the disappeared who keep waiting for miracles. Armaan recently told me he is well and had written a book. As human rights workers, we too wait for such miracles. Yet, too often, human rights abuses persist. The accused will be prosecuted by the Bangladesh International Crimes Tribunal, but concerns remain about ensuring fair trial standards and the use of the death penalty.