taken to ensure compliance of the accepted treaty obligations under the CAT. As the study highlights, acts of torture in most cases are results of the violation of legal norms, rather than absence of laws. Although weaknesses in the existing legal framework contribute to torture and hence require reforms, what make people more vulnerable to torture are lack of accountability and a culture of impunity – together they undermine all the legal guarantees against torture and other cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment or punishment. It is for this reason that democratic governance is crucial for combating torture by asking for more accountability and ensuring more publicity of both rights and their violations. Yet, democratic governance as a matter of right is somehow excluded from the discourse on democratic governance in Bangladesh. This omission of the legal dimension of democratic governance facilitates the exclusion of the governed in the process of governance, despite occasional arrangements for target group consultations on certain issues. In a systematic manner, this exclusion turns ‘citizens’ into the ‘subjects’ of the State, in which they are put under all forms of regulation in the name of greater public interest without any proper opportunity of being consulted. The lack (rather ignorance) of a well-articulated legal basis for democratic participation in governance leaves citizens with few options to intervene in this process of exclusion. As a result, the fragile political structure coupled with ‘low 64