The UNODC's Terrorism Prevention Branch (UNODC/TPB) co-organized a workshop with the Bangladesh Ministry of Foreign Affairs for Bangladesh on strengthening national legal frameworks for preventing and countering violent extremism (PVE/CVE) leading to terrorism through criminal justice approaches in Dhaka from 22-23 November 2017.
The United Nations Regional Coordinator for Bangladesh and the Director General of the Bangladesh Ministry of Foreign Affairs provided their opening remarks in commencement of the workshop. The workshop brought together representatives of Bangladesh's government ministries, prosecutorial services, judiciary, academia, and NGOs, as well as international experts invited by UNODC/TPB. The workshop's training sessions highlighted PVE/CVE experiences of Bangladeshi participants and presented national perspectives from the Maldives, Singapore and the United Kingdom. Notably, students from Dhaka University made a presentation of their campaign "Think Twice, Act Wise", a platform to provide youth with PVE/CVE resources and activities, which won the Facebook Global Digital Challenge competition in 2017.
In the closing session, participants discussed good practices and further steps to strengthen national PVE/CVE programming. Their recommendations included the development of counter-terrorism narrative materials in print and online; providing youth outreach and PVE/CVE awareness programmes at schools and door-to-door to reach rural areas, and improved data gathering to understand criminality related to extremism.
The workshop was organized under UNODC/TPB's Project on Strengthening the Capacity of South and South East Asian Countries to Prevent and Counter Violent Extremism and Foreign Terrorist Fighters through Effective Criminal Justice Responses and was funded by the Government of Japan.