She matters for several reasons. For me, there are three main reasons.

First, nobody should become a victim of power abuse. What had happened to her is a clear case of the powerful trying to silence someone powerless or assumed to be powerless.

Second, it exposes the hypocrisy of many that belong to the Bangladeshi civil society, who pretend to believe in liberty and justice.

In 2013, thousands of such people went to the Shahbagh Square in Dhaka and chanted for, pleaded and sang beautiful songs requesting the government of Bangladesh to hang people without a free trial. Many such people are expressing outrage at the treatment of Pori Moni by the system.

Third, unlike Pori Moni, who is famous and has admirers, there are thousands and thousands of people in Bangladesh who are experiencing power abuse daily. Many such people are lingering in jail on bogus and false cases. There are also the disappeared ones.

Pori Moni matters because the struggle against power abuse should be for all and applied in all circumstances, without any exceptions. There should be no place for selective justice and call for the hanging of people without a fair trial. I strongly believe that capital punishment should be abolished altogether, mainly because people can and are routinely killed through false charges and bogus trials for political, money and personal reasons. And miscarriage of justice often happens even when the justice system tries its best to deliver fair justice.

Those who called for and supported the hanging of people without a fair trial should have no moral grounds to criticise the current system in Bangladesh when they asked and demanded that the system to engage in power abuse nearly a decade earlier.