“I was picked up, held, interrogated and eventually deported by intelligence services because of my reporting”, Susannah Savage, a freelance journalist working for the Economist in Bangladesh, recently tweeted after she was interrogated and forced to leave the country by Bangladeshi intelligence forces.
Human rights activists have been railing against the Bangladeshi government’s use of the controversial ‘Digital Security Act’ to gag media and free speech for a long time, to no avail. Bangladesh continues to fall down the rankings in the World Press Freedom Index: hundreds of people, including journalists, university teachers, cartoonists and photographers, have been arrested and jailed on charges of "spreading disinformation against the government and state" on social media platforms.
Significantly, while journalists make up a disproportionately large group among the total number of arrestees, around 80 percent of accusers are politically affiliated with the Bangladesh Awami League, the ruling centre-left political party.
