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Workers’ Access to Justice event concludes in Dhaka
October 23, 2023
21 Oct 2023, 11:56 PM 
A two-day-daylong event on Workers’ Access to Justice, the first of its kind in Bangladesh, concluded in Dhaka on Saturday.
The program was organized by BLAST and Dnet in partnership with the Rule of Law Collaborative at the University of South Carolina.
The event focused on developing innovative methods to create pathways for workers’ access to justice in Bangladesh. A Judges’ Panel led by MA Awal, chairman (in-charge) of the Labour Appellate Tribunal, selected the winner after reviewing presentations by five competing teams.
The winning multi-disciplinary team was awarded for its proposal on Justice Delayed is Justice Denied: Resolving the Labor Court Crisis.
The event aimed to harness the expertise and creativity of participants to generate actionable ideas and solutions—including out-of-the-box approaches on five focus areas:
1. Business and Labor Rights: Leveraging the private sector to enhance justice processes
2. Bridging the Gap: Improving the Justice Journeys of Formal and Informal Workers.
3. Justice modernization and innovation: Enhancing the enforcement of labour laws through the lens of 21st-century tools.
4. Justice delayed is justice denied: Resolving the labour court crisis.
5. Workers’ Rights and Climate Justice: Intersectional Human Rights.
Participants were involved as competitors, mentors, and judges and each of the five teams included lawyers, entrepreneurs, and tech professionals with an interest in promoting workers’ rights.
Representatives from trade unions and labor rights groups, alongside lawyers and academics, served as mentors in order to ensure that the ideas developed took into account workers’ needs and experiences in addition to providing professional guidance to the competitors based on their professional and academic perspectives.
The judges ‘panel comprised MA Awal, chairman of the Labour Appellate Tribunal, Sadaf Saaz Siddiqi, an entrepreneur and business leader, Maheen Sultan, senior research fellow at BRAC Institute of Governance and Development, Shahadat Hossain, executive director of DNET, and Nurul Alam, member of the Board of Trustees of BLAST.
Staff Reporter
Dhaka Tribune
21 Oct 2023, 11:56 PM
