YPSA organized advocacy meeting with the legal groups and lawyers association in Chittagong at Chittagong Bar Association auditorium for sharing the rights of climate change displaced persons in Bangladesh under YPSA-HLP rights initiative project on 26th August’13 supported by Displacement Solutions.
Md. Kamal Uddin, Secretary of Chittagong Bar Association thanks YPSA for organize this workshop with lawyers. He said Bangladesh is the most vulnerable countries of the world due to climate change and this is creating displacement enormously, which is the responsible for increasing social insecurity and valance of law and justice in the disaster prone area.
Mr. Chandan Das, President of Chittagong Bar Association expressed his worried for the climate change impact in Bangladesh. He said Bangladesh has several policies and strategies on environment, disaster management and human right issue. But no specific policies for rehabilitation and ensuring housing, lands and property rights of displaced people in Bangladesh, which is urgent requirement for Bangladesh to handle this issue. It is necessary to take necessary action by lawyers for monitoring the khas land distribution by govt. for real climate displaced peoples. He offered YPSA to work together in future to support this initiative in legal aspect.
Mr. Tanvir Zaman, Legal Support Officer of YPSA was facilitated the whole meeting with lawyers. Team Leader of YPSA-HLP project Md. Shahjahan welcomed everybody to attend in the workshop and thanked to Chittagong Bar Association for cordial suport to arrange this workshop. He said, climate displacement in Bangladesh is now a major problem of Bangladesh and the rights of housing, lands and property have to be ensured to solve the problem. There are no definite policy and action plan for better settlement of climate displaced people in the country and we are doing advocacy for the new policy by the government and lawyers will be major stakeholder for our future activities and strategy. So, we arranged this advocacy workshop with lawyers for sharing the status of climate displacement in Bangladesh.
Mr. Subir Das presented the main theme of the advocacy workshop. After the presentation, Mr. Ezekiel Simperingham, Legal Consultant of Displacement Solution discussed more this issue with distinguished participants and asked to the participants for their comments to way forward this issue. The participant lawyers said climate displacement is the new theme for us and the deprivation of rights of climate displaced people is surprising to us. The lawyers came to a consensus to form a forum to raise the voice in favor of climate displaced people to avail their rights on housing, land and property. YPSA also ensured them to provide all sorts of support on time to this forum of lawyers. Finally it is expected that YPSA will continue this effort to organizing regular meeting with interested lawyers for forming lawyers association or forum for providing legal support to displaced people of Bangladesh.
Mr. Prabal Barua and Syed Assraf Ullah, Program Officer of YPSA attended in the workshop and ensured all logistic and information support to workshop.