Bangladeshi lawyer juggles mothering, green causes

RM AWARDEE Syeda Rizwana Hasan GRIG C. MONTEGRANDE

Bangladeshi activist Syeda Rizwana Hasan has faced the Supreme Court countless times in her defense of environmental causes. But one of her appearances before the court in 2005 stands out in her memory.

While arguing her case against a real estate developer that built a housing project in the wetlands, Hasan asked to be excused and hurried out of the courthouse each time her phone rang, the 44-year-old lawyer recalled.

In the car was her infant son, noisily demanding to suckle. It had been only six days after Hasan had given birth to Ahmed Zeedan Siddique, now 7 years old, but not even the duties of motherhood could stop her from fighting one of her many legal battles.

“Our driver would give me a missed call every time the baby cried. Then I would [seek] permission from the court to go down and feed my baby,” Hasan, a mother of three, said, smiling at the recollection.

“This is something I will never forget,” said Hasan, one of the six laureates for 2012 of the Ramon Magsaysay Award, widely considered Asia’s version of the Nobel Prize.

The laureates will receive their awards on Friday. They will each receive a certificate, a medallion bearing the likeness of the late President Ramon Magsaysay, after whom the award is named, and a cash prize during presentation ceremonies at the Philippine International Convention Center.

Judicial activism

In electing Hasan, the Ramon Magsaysay Awards Foundation (RMAF) recognized her “uncompromising courage and impassioned leadership in a campaign of judicial activism in Bangladesh that affirms the people’s right to a good environment as nothing less than their right to dignity and life.”

In an interview with the Philippine Daily Inquirer, Hasan said her judicial struggles were so imbued with public interest, and the people’s welfare so much at stake, that she dared not even think she could lose any of her cases.

“In this type of cases, losing a battle is not easy. If you lose a battle, you lose a cause. If you win the battle, it’s not you who wins it. It’s the cause that is won,” she said.

It was a kind of desperation that drove her to go to court that day seven years ago, not even a week after delivering her third and last child by cesarian section, she said.

“At that point I was desperate. I wanted them (the real estate firm) to be defeated… I know that if what they’re doing is allowed to continue, the city will be in a bad shape,” she said.

Testing the law

In 2000, Hasan’s firm, the Bangladesh Environmental Lawyers Association (Bela), mounted a successful campaign for a law that would ban the filling up of wetlands in Bangladesh, a small but densely populated country on the Indian subcontinent. But that law was never enforced.

“In 2004, Hasan put the law to a test by filing a case against a rich and powerful land development company, for filling land for a new township in the middle of a flood-flow zone,” the RMAF said in an essay citing Hasan’s achievements.

“Hasan and her small team had to face 20 senior, high-profile lawyers, navigate court corruption and endure protracted delays.

“Eventually, they won, when the court ruled the housing project to be illegal,” it said.

Appeals and counterappeals were filed in the courts. In the meantime, the developer had already sold lots, and some of the buyers continued to pay for their mortgages, believing Hasan and Bela would eventually lose.

But in August, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Hasan and her firm. “All [of our hard work] paid off,” Hasan said. “We won the battle in such a big way.”

Inner change

Born on Jan. 15, 1968 in Dhaka, to a family “with a tradition of public service,” Hasan said she grew up with a fascination for the law. But Hasan said becoming an environmental lawyer was not originally part of her plans.

After earning a master’s degree in law from the University of Dhaka, she joined Bela, a pioneer in public interest litigation founded by lawyer-activist Mohiuddin Farooque.

“I joined this organization solely for the purpose of doing some research, coming out with publications, and applying for scholarships so I can go for a Ph.D.,” Hasan said.

But while doing field work, something changed in her, she said.

“I started talking to the people, and then I started relating their real-life grievances with the existing laws. I realized there was so much you can do,” she said.

Bela is 100-percent funded by foreign donors, including from the Netherlands, Canada and the United Kingdom. “We do not take money from the people who come to us for legal services because they are in most cases very poor. They can’t afford it,” she said.

When Farooque died in 1997, Hasan assumed leadership as executive director of Bela, now with a modest staff of 55 people, 18 of whom are lawyers, and most of them “young and fresh blood.”

Since she became Bela’s leader, the group’s “legal activism has widened,” according to the RMAF.

Goldman prize

“It has taken on close to a hundred cases involving industrial pollution, sand extraction from rivers, forest rights, river pollution and encroachment, hill cutting, illegal fisheries, waste dumping and others,” the foundation said.

In 2009, Hasan was awarded the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize, the world’s highest honor for grassroots environmentalists. She was also named one of Time magazine’s “Heroes of the Environment” that year.

The US-based Goldman Environmental Foundation cited Hasan for “working to reduce the impact of Bangladesh’s exploitative and environmentally devastating shipbreaking industry” and leading a legal battle to increase government regulation and heighten public awareness about the dangers of shipbreaking.

Since 2003, Hasan and Bela have fought a battle in the courts to prevent toxin-laden ships from entering Bangladesh unless they have been decontaminated at their origin, and to enforce standards for the protection of workers and the environment, the RMAF said.

Significant successes

“Even as this battle is not over, Hasan has scored significant successes,” the foundation said.

For the first time in Bangladesh’s judicial history, a polluter was penalized after a court imposed a fine on MT Enterprise, a ship that entered Bangladesh in 2006, and that defied an order blocking its breaking that Hasan’s group had secured.

Then, in 2009, the Supreme Court directed the closure of all 36 shipbreaking yards in Bangladesh that had been operating without environmental clearance, and directed the “precleaning,” at origin or before entering Bangladesh, of all ships to be imported for breaking, RMAF said.

But her advocacies have also made Hasan a target of attack—from getting vilified in the corporate media to receiving death threats and crank phone calls.

Hasan shrugs it off. “I do not get concerned because I know for sure that why would someone threaten you? He or she would only threaten you when he or she himself or herself feels threatened,” she said.

Boost to credibility

One of the ways she sees Bela and herself surviving such threats is through international support, and in this sense, the conferment of the RM Award will help raise her organization’s global profile.

“One thing this award will do is add to our credibility. From now on, I believe we will be taken much more seriously. Because so far, we have had community support in our favor. But now there is international backup for what we are doing,” she said.