2012 Ramon Magsaysay Awards: Bangladesh lawyer fights for environmental justice

MANILA, Philippines - She “eats death threats for breakfast” but no amount of intimidation can diminish Bangladeshi lawyer Syeda Rizwana Hasan’s passion to protect the people’s right to a healthy environment.

Hasan, executive director of the Bangladesh Environmental Lawyers Association (BELA), a pioneer in public interest litigation, has fought a battle in the courts to prevent toxic-laden ships from entering their country unless they have decontaminated at their point of origin.

Hasan is among six recipients of this year’s Ramon Magsaysay Award, the Asian counterpart of the Nobel Prize.

“I’m lucky to have one death threat during the hearing phase of one case. I try not to take them seriously. I know that my opponents are threatening me because their financial interests are threatened,” Hasan told The STAR yesterday.

Hasan, who assumed leadership of BELA in 1997 when its founder, respected lawyer-activist Mohiuddi Farooque, died, has also moved mountains to enforce standards for the protection of workers and the environment.

Hasan said their battle may be far from over but they have managed to score significant successes.

For the first time in the judicial history of Bangladesh, compensatory fines were ordered against a polluter in 2003.

In 2009, the Supreme Court also ordered the closure of all 36 ship-breaking yards in Bangladesh that have been operating without environmental clearance, and directed the pre-cleaning at origin, or before entering Bangladesh, of all ships to be imported for breaking.

“Things are not so rosy yet but I am hopeful that in time our efforts will pay off,” Hasan said.

From the time she took over as head of BELA, the organization’s legal activism has widened, taking on close to a hundred cases involving industrial pollution, sand extraction from rivers, forest rights, river pollution and encroachment, hill cutting, illegal fisheries, and waste dumping, among others.

“Also now, every political party in Bangladesh needs to have environmental protection in their platform of governance,” Hasan added.

Born in Dhaka to a family with a tradition of public service, Hasan earned a master’s degree in law and immediately went to work for BELA.

Hasan stressed that the right to environment is part of the constitutional right to life.

“My job it so revive hope in the judicial system among Bangladeshis, to give the message to the people that the law and lawyers do not always exist for the mightiest,” Hasan said.

“When I talk to people, I see their sufferings. You see, when we took our oath as lawyers, we promised to uphold the interest of the poor people,” Hasan said.

Apart from the Ramon Magsaysay Award, Hasan has also received numerous honors including the Global 500 Roll of Honor from the United Nations Environment Program, Heroes of the Environment from Time Magazine and Goldman Environmental Prize from the Goldman Environmental Foundation-USA.

“It’s a happy feeling that we are recognized, not only me but my colleagues and the entire team. Certainly there are times when we feel that we can’t proceed any further... but citations such as the Ramon Magsaysay Award tell us that perhaps we are on the right track and we just have to keep going,” Hasan said.