The government has moved to amend the existing Evidence Act 1872 to remove the ability of the defence in a rape case to bring up ‘negative remarks’ regarding a victim’s character or brand them as “immoral”, said Law Minister Anisul Huq.
“Section 155 (4) of the Evidence Act 1872, expressly allows defence lawyers to introduce character evidence against rape complainants during trials,” the minister said in parliament on Wednesday.
“We have received instructions to amend it. We hope to present the overhauled law to the parliament in September.”
Legal experts say the section of the law helps rapists to avoid justice.
Not only is the rape a traumatic experience for the victim, there are also many obstacles to reporting the crime and receiving justice, Bangladesh Legal Aid and Services Trust, or BLAST, said in a report.
Even if the victim overcomes these barriers and manages to bring the case to court, the current law allows the defence to use this ‘character evidence’ to slander the victim and ask them degrading questions in an open courtroom, the report says.
The humiliation and harassment associated with this is why the practice has been labelled a ‘second rape’.
The so-called “character evidence” is also used to cast doubt on a victim’s testimony, making it seem unreliable without the backing of other witnesses or circumstantial evidence, making it difficult to get a guilty verdict, according to the BLAST report.
The report cites a particular case where four men were accused of gang-raping a teenage girl and photographing the incident as an example of how this section of the law can be misused.
After the rape occurred, the victim’s father went to the perpetrators and begged them to return the photographs, but they rejected his request, saying the victim had an ‘immoral character’ and threatened to spread the photographs in public, if they took legal action against them.
The victim committed suicide and her family claimed it was because the perpetrators had refused to return the photographs.
During the trial, the defence argued that she committed suicide for family reasons and because she was of “immoral character”. They claimed the girl had an affair with a local boy and committed suicide when her father refused to give permission to marry him.
The trial court convicted the men, but the High Court later revised the decision, saying that there was no direct link between the rape and the suicide.
“This case illustrates how the character assassination of a rape victim begins socially and is then transported to the courtroom,” BLAST said.
Generally, rape cases are filed under the Prevention of Violence Against Women and Children Act 2000. The act has dropped the word “the raped” and used ‘rape victim’ when it was amended last November. Also, it elevated the highest punitive action for rape to the death sentence.
Human rights activists have been demanding an overhaul of the Evidence Act for a long time. The government is working on it and also trying to embed the use of information technology in the Evidence Act, said Law Minister Anisul Huq.
The courts were closed from Mar 25 to May 2020 due to the coronavirus pandemic, leading to a substantial backlog of cases.
“It was at that time the prime minister gave us instructions to run a virtual court using information technology. As there’s no scope of virtual trial according to the Evidence Act, we need to overhaul the law,” he said, reports bdnews24.com.