human rights provision. The report also provides a set of recommendations on both legal reforms and law enforcement, developed in consultation with the Bangladesh National Human Rights Commission (BNHRC) and the BNHRC – Capacity Development Project. To meet the doctrinal thrust of this project, throughout the report, we concerned ourselves less with ‘primary’ knowledge-construction than with the analysis of key legal discourses in the field; hence the report is based mostly on secondary data. 3. Overview of the ICCPR The post-WWII phase of international law was set for reaffirming faith in and promoting certain crucial values: fundamental human rights, dignity and worth of individuals, equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small, among others.11 After the horrors of World War II, a broad consensus emerged at the worldwide level demanding that the individual human being be placed under the protection of the international community. Since the protective mechanisms at the domestic level alone did not provide sufficiently stable safeguards, as the lessons of the holocaust demonstrate, it became necessary to entrust a new world organisation – the United Nations – with assuming the role of guarantor of human rights on a universal scale. 11 22 See, the Preamble of the Charter of the United Nations.