The recent High Court case involving three women who were stopped from travelling to Nepal took me back to an incident I experienced in 2017.
I was travelling to Nepal alone.
I remember the immigration officer vividly. Not because he was particularly rude or aggressive, but because of the nature of the questions he asked me.
I handed over my passport. He began turning its pages, stopping at some of the visas from my previous travels.
“Why did you travel Europe?”
I told him that I had attended a course on gender and political discourse.
He looked at me and asked, “What is gender?”
Then came another question: “So, you are a feminist?”
What followed was a series of questions about my private life. My marital status, what did my father do and why was I travelling alone? I answered them all.
I remained calm because, at an airport immigration desk, the person asking the questions holds institutional authority. You have a flight to catch. You do not know whether challenging the officer will create a problem. So you answer. You cooperate. You move on.
It's not whether an immigration officer has the right to ask questions. Of course, immigration authorities have legitimate powers. International travel is regulated. Passports, visas, identity, security concerns and legal restrictions are all matters that can properly be examined.
The issue begins when the state moves from asking, “Are you legally entitled to travel?” to asking, “What kind of woman are you, and who has authorised you to do this?”
Those are two entirely different questions.
The private life of a woman at a public counter
Feminist scholars have long challenged the artificial separation between the “private” and the “public” spheres.
The traditional patriarchal order often locates women within the family: as daughters under fathers, wives under husbands and, more broadly, as members of households whose decisions are expected to be mediated through male authority.
I was legally an adult.
But the questioning seemed to place me somewhere else: as someone’s daughter first, someone’s potential wife second, and an independent citizen only after that.
This is what feminist theorists describe through different concepts of patriarchal paternalism: the idea that women require protection, supervision or permission even when they possess the same formal legal capacity as men.
Paternalism can look benevolent. It can present itself as concern for a woman’s safety, family, reputation or welfare.
I was legally an adult. But the questioning seemed to place me somewhere else: as someone’s daughter first, someone’s potential wife second, and an independent citizen only after that.
But there is an important question beneath that concern:
Who gets to decide what an adult woman needs protection from—and who gets to decide on her behalf?
From social prejudice to institutional power
Sociology gives us another way of understanding what happens in encounters like this.
Social norms do not remain confined to families and communities. They can enter institutions through the people who operate them.
An immigration officer does not cease to be a member of society when he puts on an official uniform. He brings assumptions, cultural expectations and ideas about gender into the workplace.
The danger begins when those assumptions acquire institutional consequences.
A belief that an unmarried woman should not travel alone is one thing when expressed by a relative or neighbour. It becomes something fundamentally different when the same belief influences whether a government official allows her to board an international flight.
This is particularly significant when we think about women’s mobility. The freedom to move through public space has historically been shaped not only by formal law but also by informal expectations about where women should go, when they should go, and with whom they should travel.
But mobility is not merely a sociological or feminist concept. In Bangladesh, the ability to leave the country is expressly recognised as a constitutional right.
A belief that an unmarried woman should not travel alone is one thing when expressed by a relative or neighbour. It becomes something fundamentally different when the same belief influences whether a government official allows her to board an international flight.
That makes the question of who may travel, and on what grounds the state may stop them, a constitutional question as well.
The law is clearer than the social assumptions
Article 36 of the Constitution of Bangladesh guarantees every citizen the right to leave and re-enter Bangladesh, subject to reasonable restrictions imposed by law in the public interest.
The wording matters. The Constitution recognises the individual’s freedom to leave the country, while also recognising that the state may impose restrictions. But those restrictions must be imposed by law and must be reasonable.
This is where the distinction between legitimate immigration control and gendered scrutiny becomes particularly important.
An immigration officer may have lawful grounds to question a traveller about identity, documentation, visa requirements, court orders, security concerns or other matters relevant to the exercise of immigration authority. But an adult woman’s marital status, her decision to travel alone, or whether her family approves of her journey does not automatically become a lawful basis for restricting her movement.
That boundary becomes even clearer when read alongside Article 27, which guarantees equality before law, and Article 28, which prohibits discrimination on the ground of sex and guarantees women equal rights with men in all spheres of state and public life.
The constitutional question, then, is not simply whether women should be allowed to travel independently. It is whether the state can impose a restriction on an adult citizen’s movement based on assumptions that would not ordinarily be applied to men and without a corresponding legal basis.
If a person is subject to a court order, a lawful travel restriction, an immigration requirement or a genuine security concern, the state may have grounds to intervene.
But being unmarried is not, by itself, a security category.
Being a woman travelling alone is not, by itself, a legal disability.
The significance of the recent High Court case
This is why the recent case involving three women stopped from travelling to Nepal deserves attention.
According to reports, the women were adults with valid travel documents and were allegedly questioned about their marital status, family and travelling without guardians. The High Court has now asked why preventing them from travelling should not be declared unlawful and why guidelines should not be formulated to prevent similar gender-based obstruction of adult women’s lawful foreign travel.
The court has not yet finally determined the facts or the legality of the incident. That distinction matters.
But the legal question it has raised is larger than this particular case.
It asks where the boundary lies between the legitimate authority of the state and the informal authority of patriarchy.
That boundary matters because discrimination does not always announce itself through an explicit rule saying, “Women cannot travel alone.”
Sometimes it appears as a question.
Sometimes as suspicion.
Sometimes as an extra five minutes at a counter.
Sometimes as a request to call a father.
But would he ask the same question to a male traveller?
No, for sure.
A passport establishes who we are.
The law establishes what we are entitled to do.
An adult woman travelling alone should not be an administrative abnormality. It should simply be an adult citizen exercising a right recognised by the Constitution.