Mohammad Khan

Women’s legal rights are one of the most significant determinants of their status. In Bangladesh, a series of laws ensuring women’s rights have proven largely ineffective in promoting their positions. The prime reasons for this are: dirtier politics, the ineffective implementation of women rights laws, the traditional and cultural negative views about women’s rights, the absence of an accountable and transparent government, the expensive and time consuming judicial process, the lack of an efficient judiciary, and other socio-economic reasons. The core theme of this essay concentrates on the ineffective enforcement of laws with the objective to promote protection of women’s rights by recommending remedies to flaws in prevailing laws in Bangladesh. Recommendations are made by reference to comparative and international practices. The primary arguments developed throughout this essay are: the protection of women’s rights is imperative to improve their status the legislative, administrative and judicial efforts dealing with women’s rights; and improvements in those effortsto better protect women’s rights. This study examines laws regarding women’s employment and political participation and the laws on dowry. It also explores the ways laws have been structured and enforced in Bangladesh, and how law can be an effective means of women’s pursuit of rights.

In pursuit of a just political order, Will Kymlicka has defended a liberal conception of multiculturalism. The persuasive appeal of his argument, like that of secular-liberalism more generally, is due to presenting liberalism as a neutral and universal political project. Utilizing Charles Taylor’s genealogy of ‘exclusive humanism’ in A Secular Age, this thesis attempts to re-read Kymlicka in order to make certain theological commitments in his work explicit. Here I argue that Kymlicka, in order to make his conception of multiculturalism plausible, relies on a theologically-thick and controversial humanism operating under secular conditions of belief. By committing himself to a particular conception of the human and specific conditions of belief, Kymlicka’s liberal multiculturalism is rendered provincially incoherent because it fails to treat in a neutral manner certain theological commitments.