CA to meet with reform commissions this afternoon

Chief Advisor Muhammad Yunus will meet with the six commissions formed to reform different sectors of the state on Thursday afternoon.

The meeting will be held at 3:45 pm at the Chief Advisor’s Office, according to his Deputy Press Secretary Apurba Jahangir.

Six heads have been appointed to bring reforms to the election system, the police, the judiciary, the Anti-Corruption Commission, the public administration, and the Constitution.

Badiul Alam Majumder, the secretary of SHUJAN: Citizens for Good Governance, leads the committee for electoral reform. He is an economist, political analyst, local government expert and development activist. He also serves as country director and global vice president of 'The Hunger Project' and the president of the National Girl Child Advocacy Forum, reports bdnews24.com.

During the 2001 caretaker government, Badiul was a member of the Board of Governors for the Bangladesh Rural Development Academy. That same year, he served as a member of the Local Government Institutions Mobilization and Strengthening Committee.

Safar Raj Hossain is overseeing the commission on the police administration. He is a former secretary of Home Affairs and Organization and a former secretary of local government. He also served as deputy commissioner of Cumilla and Gaibandha.

Former Appellate Division justice Shah Abu Naeem Mominur Rahman is heading the commission on the judiciary. He was appointed to the Appellate Division in July 2009. He resigned after Mozammel Hossain was appointed chief justice in 2011 in violation of seniority.

Mominur studied at the Dhaka University’s Department of Physics before turning to law. He began practising as a lawyer in 1972, was enrolled to the High Court Division in 1974, and then to the Appellate Division in 1980. Thereafter, he joined the High Court Division as a judge.

Iftekhar Zaman, executive director of Transparency International Bangladesh, is heading the commission on reforms to the Anti-Corruption Commission. He is also a trustee of the Bangladesh Freedom Foundation and a member of the International Chattogram Hill Tracts Commission. In May 2015, he received the Social Accountability Award from the World Bank Global Partnership Forum.

Abdul Muyeed Chowdhury has been appointed as the head of the commission on public administration reform. He was recently appointed as chairman of Biman Bangladesh Airlines. In 1991, during the BNP government, he served as the managing director and CEO of Biman and remained in the post until 1994. In 2001, he became an advisor to the caretaker government led by Latifur Rahman. In 2009, after the Awami League government was formed, he was removed from the post of chairman of the Biman Board of Directors within 19 days of his appointment.

Initially, Supreme Court lawyer Shahdeen Malik was selected as the head of the Constitution reform commission, but he was replaced 10 days later by Ali Riaz, a professor of politics and government at Illinois State University. He is the president of the American Institute of Bangladesh Studies and a senior non-resident fellow of the Atlantic Council. A literary secretary of the Dhaka University Central Students Union, Ali Riaz pursued his higher education in the UK and then in the US. In 1993, he received his PhD in political science from the University of Hawaii under the East-West Fellowship.