Bangladesh’s flawed attempt at transitional justice after Sheikh Hasina

“I WANT THEM TO BE HANGED,” said Umama Fatema, one of the students who brought down the government of Bangladesh last summer. “But I think we have to send them to the International Criminal Court.” .I had asked her about a few dozen figures of the old regime currently in jail in Dhaka, men and women who had enjoyed unassailable authority over 180 million Bangladeshis under the former prime minister Sheikh Hasina. In August 2024, that came to a dramatic end after Umama and her fellow protesters spent three weeks on the streets of Dhaka, defiant in the face of Hasina’s brutal but unsuccessful crackdown..The interim government of Bangladesh under Muhammad Yunus, which now holds power in Dhaka, has put accountability and justice at the forefront of its agenda. However, it faces challenges on multiple fronts: a volatile political climate, its own lack of capacity, and the complexity of legal cases spanning multiple jurisdictions. And it is working against the clock as, every day, changing political circumstances constrain it further. While wishing to strengthen the rule of law and the country’s institutions, it has presided over a system of continuing legal abuses..Under Hasina, tens of thousands of people were arrested on false charges for political reasons, thousands were forcibly disappeared, and,finally, over a thousand were killed in the three weeks of the revolution. The interim government is committed to hold these alleged perpetrators accountable for their actions. But, in today’s Bangladesh, justice might be hard to come by. Passions are running high. The country’s institutions are in disarray and some may be actively opposed to accountability. Perhaps most worryingly, the interim government has failed to clean up the administration of justice, and instead continued the abusive habits of its predecessor. Ten months after the Monsoon Revolution, it has banned Hasina’s party, the Awami League, but no credible judicial proceedings have taken place..FOR MANY IN BANGLADESH, memories of the crimes committed during Hasina’s regime are still raw. The normally stoical Fatema told me she couldn’t forget the bloodshed she saw last in July. “It just shatters me,” she said. “You can’t imagine how bad it will be if they get away with killing 1600 people.”.It is clear that accountability and redress for those violations is something that people across the political spectrum care deeply about. However, there are circumstances outside of their control that make justice difficult to achieve. For one thing, a popular desire for revenge appears to have infected attitudes towards justice. .When she was produced before a judge in August 2024, the former education minister Dipu Moni was assaulted by lawyers inside the court room. At a music concert in December, the student leader Sarjis Alam led a crowd of thousands in chanting “fashi chai” – “We want them hanged”. Retaliatory violence has been widespread. In the immediate aftermath of Hasina’s fall, protesters attacked members of the police and the Awami League. The party claims that 144 of its members and officials were killed in retaliatory attacks, while the police put its own death toll at over 50..And it did not stop in August: in February 2025, sites associated with the Awami League were bulldozed across the country in a coordinated operation by members of the public. On that occasion, the police and the army stood by, allowing the crowds free rein to vent their anger. That inaction appears to be in keeping with semi-official government policy: the interim government has said that those responsible for the violence between 15 July and 8 August – the start of the protests in support of the movement and the day the interim government took office – will not face prosecution..Less violent, but equally worrying, is the indiscriminate legal assault on the Awami League and its supporters. Apart from banning the party, the government has prohibited any expression of support for it. This has formalised a long-standing conflation of moral disapproval and legal censure; it may be distasteful to support a dictatorship, but, if one values freedom of expression, doing so is still not a crime. The interim government emphatically disagrees..Starting in August last year, individuals associated with the old regime have been arrested and detained without evidence. Members of the public began to file murder cases related to the deaths of protesters in July and August; most of these cases named hundreds of alleged perpetrators, many of whom had no connection with any crime. Bangladeshi law allows the police to arrest anyone accused in such cases as they see fit, so thousands of people across the country have found themselves at risk of arrest..Some of those detained – such as Hasina’s ministers and security officials – are undoubtedly guilty of grave crimes. The murder charges against them are plausible, although no granular evidence against them has so far been adduced in court. Others are widely disliked because they helped enable Hasina’s worst excesses, and they too have been detained on murder charges without evidence. .Support Himal's independent journalism on Bangladesh. Become a patron today for just USD 5/month!.The lawyer Tureen Afroz, for example, was a public prosecutor in Bangladesh’s International Crimes Tribunal (ICT), who by all accounts did Hasina’s bidding. The ICT, despite its name, is an entirely domestic mechanism, set up to try individuals responsible for war crimes during Bangladesh’s 1971 Liberation War against Pakistan. Hasina leaned heavily on the ICT to convict a number of her political opponents on charges of collaboration with the Pakistan army some 40 years earlier, and some of these individuals were sentenced to death. Afroz, as an ICT prosecutor, was complicit in a deeply flawed process that cost a number of men their lives. But when Afroz was arrested this April, she was charged not with professional misconduct or corruption but rather with attempted murder in the case of a person who was shot by security forces in August. Afroz may well have supported Hasina’s use of violence, but it is absurd to suggest that she had any place in the chain of command that led to that violence..Most egregiously, there are people in jail in Dhaka who were neither involved in Hasina’s crackdown nor her government. They are being detained, mostly on charges of murder, because of their ideological association with Hasina and the Awami League. Shahriar Kabir, for example, is an academic and activist who was clearly not involved in Hasina’s crackdown last year. He was, however, an ideological supporter of some aspects of her agenda. The 74-year-old has been in jail since September, and we can only assume that he is being punished for his views. .These practices have drawn concerned statements from the United Nations, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, alongside international lawyers’ and journalists’ associations. The interim government has not been able to halt these abuses; rather, it has continued them. .THE LAW ADVISOR to Bangladesh’s interim government, Asif Nazrul, was at pains to point out to me that these cases do not come from the government. “The government is not instigating or filing these cases,” Nazrul told me. “These cases are being filed by persons who were oppressed for the last 15 years. You can say to some extent it’s revenge or a backlash against the previous regime.”.Private individuals may have filed the cases, but state agencies have used them to arrest hundreds of people, some of them unjustly. The interim government could have stopped this practice by changing the law or issuing suitable guidelines to the police. Nazrul said this was unfeasible: “We thought about changing the law … to require the police to first assess the credibility of cases before allowing people to file them. But we realised we couldn’t sell this idea to the people. This is a post-revolutionary period. You can’t expect people to act logically all the time.”.Moreover, he said, if the law was changed to prevent members of the public filing cases that name people en masse, it would have empowered the police to decide only to file those cases they thought had merit. “Some people said, if you give the police this power, the police could take bribes,” he explained. .As a result, murder cases continue to be filed by members of the public, naming hundreds of people without any obvious connections to the crime of murder. According to Nazrul, the government has tried to address this. “We are trying to coordinate between the police and the judiciary, talking to people who want to file [meritless] cases, advising them that this weakens their case,” he said. “We have done a lot of sensitisation programmes for the police, and given written instructions to police that before they arrest people, they should do a credible investigation. In the initial weeks, of course, to some extent we failed, because the police did not have any moral courage at all.”.Not only has the government failed to stop this practice, it has actively colluded in it by continuing to use it to detain those associated with the old regime. The police may be acting on their own to arrest those named in cases, but, in court, the state has opposed the granting of bail to those detained on political grounds, such as Shahriar Kabir, and they remain in jail. .For example, Ayesha Ferdous, a former Awami League parliamentarian, has been detained since August. After she applied to the High Court to be granted bail, her lawyer told me, “The government went to the Appellate Division to cancel the bail granted by the High Court.” She is still in jail, and no specific evidence has yet been presented in her case..These detentions are surrounded by a climate of fear: in two cases, lawyers and family members of detained individuals told me that speaking on the record would have adverse consequences for the detainees. The daughter of another detained minister, Assaduzaman Nur, recently wrote that she had received messages from “the corridors of power” to “bear this quietly, lest things become worse.” Transparent due process this is not..IN THE AFTERMATH of a dramatic transition, some people who violated the law undoubtedly need to be detained. But, to do so, the government has used the same processes that had earlier been used to victimise those who were presumably innocent. Nazrul argued this practice was necessary due to the extraordinary circumstances Bangladesh finds itself in after 15 years of dictatorship: “You have to arrest these people because otherwise they will flee.”.When I asked him about the irregular manner of their detention, he acknowledged it was not ideal: “I am worried there is not enough evidence, but we need to have time. It’s too early to expect credible evidence. We are working with destroyed institutions. We are expecting that the prosecution and investigation team will come up with evidence, but we need to be patient for that.”.Challenged over whether it was sustainable to detain representatives of the old regime without adducing evidence, Nazrul defended the practice by pointing to the crimes they are widely believed to have committed or supported. “It’s because of the last 15 years of killing and disappearance and torture,” he said. “I fully agree with you that some of the cases may be fake. But, in the majority of cases, there is merit.”.Sometimes fake cases have been filed due to personal enmity or business rivalry, but there have also been credible reports of bribery in what has become a cottage industry of warped criminal justice. Members of the public must sometimes pay hefty bribes to members of the police or private individuals to have their names removed from fake cases. Until this is done, they must live in fear of arbitrary arrest. “This is what the police have been doing for the last 15 years,” said the constitutional lawyer Shahdeen Malik. “It’s big business for them.”.The strangest and most worrying thing about this state of affairs is the near-total lack of concern for the rule of law, procedural fairness and freedom of expression. The interim government and its allies – including the National Citizen’s Party, formed by the students who led the uprising – seem to see no downside in the perception that they are victimising people they regard as morally guilty. Like Asif Nazrul, they apparently believe that the self-evident venality of their opponents is justification enough for cutting corners to ensure punishment..The interim government’s failure to get to grips with the administration of justice is especially perplexing given that it is led by numerous respected rights and civil-society activists, who have repeatedly and publicly stated their desire for Bangladesh to turn over a new leaf after the abuses of the past. This points to a highly volatile situation in which the authority of individual ministers, agencies, and of the government as a whole, remains unclear. However, everyone in or close to the interim government is implicated in the system of procedural abuses being used to detain their predecessors. As Malik put it, “After these people leave the government, they will have no moral position to criticise the next government.”.AGAINST THIS BACKDROP, the government has chosen to prosecute crimes against humanity through the ICT. It is ironic that this flawed body, set up to target Hasina’s opponents, has now been repurposed to try Hasina and her accomplices, but it is also a mark of continuity..The ICT’s current chief prosecutor, Mohammad Tajul Islam, is probing more than 130 suspected perpetrators of crimes during the 2024 revolution. On his recommendation, the tribunal has already issued 45 arrest warrants. These alleged perpetrators include Hasina, as well as many of her ministers and security officials. Islam is confident he has the evidence to prove their complicity in the murder of protesters. “We have classified records, and we have a huge amount of digital evidence, audio recordings, CCTV footage,” he told me in his recently refurbished office at the ICT, housed in a stucco colonial-era courtroom in downtown Dhaka..He gave the example of Salman F Rahman, a Bangladeshi billionaire who was one of Hasina’s closest advisors. Although Rahman is thought to have looted hundreds of millions of dollars from the country’s financial institutions, he is currently detained for murder; Islam assured me those charges are well-founded and that he has recordings of phone calls in which Rahman “was involved in giving orders to have people killed.” .In the case of Moni, Islam did not claim to have such damning audio recordings, but said the murder charges against her rely on the fact that “she was part of a core team with Sheikh Hasina, responding to the crisis.” In other cases, the murder charges are based on complicity in corporate decisions. For example, the leftist leaders Rashed Khan Menon and Hasanul Haq Inu were present at a meeting on 20 July in which it was agreed to issue “shoot on sight” orders; both are subject to ICT probes..The prosecutor said he has “insider information” too: “Perpetrators are sometimes able to provide evidence of things that they were privy to in their official capacity, or in confessions.” In other instances, his investigators are interviewing victims who are able to identify perpetrators; they are trying to collate “hundreds of thousands of videos, collected by the victims themselves or bystanders.” He claims he can recreate a “very accurate” chain of command, from Hasina and her ministers through to security officials with direct operational responsibility..“We have the official documents – the orders – supported by other evidence, like their presence on the ground,” he said. “If you can add the testimony of the senior officers, it becomes even clearer.” A pattern has emerged, all over the country, in which security forces “attacked peaceful protests all over the country to create panic and show their allegiance to Sheikh Hasina,” Islam said. Meanwhile, the former prime minister herself “discussed strategy with her lieutenants – how to kill the protestors most efficiently.”.Since Hasina’s fall, a commission has been investigating cases of enforced disappearance over the full 15 years of her rule. “We have 1700 cases and rising – that’s just the tip of the iceberg,” said Nabila Idris, a member of the commission of inquiry, who spends her days interviewing victims who had been kept in strict solitary confinement in tiny cells. Hundreds of victims are still missing, according to Idris, while thousands more have yet to come forward. Consequently, piecing things together is a painstaking process..Nevertheless, the commission has uncovered a pattern of disappearance and torture by different security agencies, including the Directorate General of Forces Intelligence, the Rapid Action Battalion, the National Security Intelligence and the Taskforce for Interrogation Cell. These come under the civilian authority of the home ministry, but are often staffed by army officers. The commission has shared evidence with the ICT to support possible cases against perpetrators in the Bangladeshi military, a highly sensitive and unprecedented development in a country where the armed and security forces quietly retain great influence..In practice, this means that a small number of people will be tried for capital offences, with varying degrees of evidentiary support. Yet a number of external factors threaten to prevent accountability in Bangladesh. For one thing, the principal architects of Hasina’s autocratic regime have fled the country. Some former ministers, like Hasan Mahmud, Hasina’s foreign minister, or Mohammad Arafat, her information minister, are in the West. If there is sufficient evidence against them, cases could be brought in the United Kingdom, the United States or the European Union under universal jurisdiction. Although such evidence may well exist, investigators have yet to produce it. .And many others have been provided shelter by the Indian government. Hasina herself, a close ally of the Indian government through her years in power, has been given a bungalow in Delhi. There are credible reports that her home minister, Asaduzzaman Khan Kamal – who had overall command responsibility for the forces that carried out much of the killing in July and August 2024 – now lives in Kolkata, alongside perhaps half a dozen other senior ministers. Although it has an extradition treaty with Bangladesh, the Indian government has not responded to repeated requests to return Hasina and the others to Bangladesh..Given India’s clear hostility to Bangladesh’s interim government, it seems unlikely that New Delhi will ever cooperate. Moreover, the Commission of Inquiry on Enforced Disappearance has uncovered evidence of alleged Indian involvement in the detention, abduction and interrogation of some of the Hasina regime’s victims. One of its reports cites victims’ testimony that they heard Hindi spoken in detention cells, while there are also documented cases of victims being abducted in Bangladesh and then detained across the border in India. In Idris’s opinion, “the Indians were horribly involved.” This makes it even less likely that India will support transitional justice in Bangladesh. The Indian embassy in Dhaka did not respond to questions regarding these claims..Another challenge is that the Bangladesh army is reluctant to cooperate. Military personnel have reportedly destroyed evidence and refused to testify. The army may also have sheltered perpetrators. In January, the ICT produced 12 arrest warrants, of which nine were for serving and retired members of the armed forces. None has been served, and the alleged perpetrators were allowed to escape. .There are also internal weaknesses in the ICT process that will hamper the path to justice. Those familiar with the process say that the bodies tasked with investigating years of possible crimes are understaffed and under-resourced and lack the specialised training such cases would require. The chief justice of Bangladesh, Syed Refaat Ahmed, told me the ICT was “a work in progress”. Even Islam, the chief prosecutor, acknowledged he is “not fully satisfied”, since “we are lacking experienced investigators and other technology.” .And then there are the problems with the law governing the ICT. Under Hasina, the ICT was hardly a credible mechanism. Consequently, the interim government has made amendments to the International Crimes Tribunal Act, which it claims will make the ICT fit to handle these cases in line with international standards. But a number of flaws persist: in contravention of international best practices, the ICT Act allows for the death penalty and in-absentia trials, while its evidence rules fall well below the standards set by international conventions such as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. The UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights has called for the ICT Act to be amended further, but the interim government has refused to do so. Ministers and officials told me that, in the febrile political climate of today’s Bangladesh, the death penalty is non-negotiable: it would be impossible to save the hated representatives of the old regime from the gallows..THOSE WHO WANT sustainable, fair transitional justice in Bangladesh are left with a bleak outlook. The interim government is trying to pursue accountability, but it faces obstruction from within and without, it lacks capacity, and it exists within a political context that favours revenge. The interim government is forced to reckon with circumstances outside of its control, but it has made the situation worse by acting in ways that cast doubt on its good faith. There is a real risk that the poor practices of the past will continue to haunt Bangladesh: that those complicit in Hasina’s dictatorship will be treated so badly that their culpability is never reliably established, that a small number of them will be hanged, in a way that turns them into martyrs while the rest will temporarily be bogged down in politicised legal processes that lack credibility. Those processes could be reversed when the political tide changes, as it surely will. And little of this will apply to anyone in khaki..Consequently, some lawyers, activists and politicians have begun to look into alternative forms of transitional justice. One popular suggestion is to involve the International Criminal Court (ICC) in the Netherlands. The British barrister Toby Cadman, who advises the Bangladeshi ICT, has publicly suggested that cases of atrocities linked to Hasina’s regime should come before the ICC in the Hague, and not the ICT in Dhaka. The interim government appears not to have heeded his advice, although Mahfuj Alam, an adviser to the information ministry, told me the government hadn’t yet made a decision: “discussions are ongoing” at the highest level, he said..Tabith Awal, a politician with the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, the Awami league’s oldest and fiercest rival, confirmed to me that his party wishes to send at least Hasina’s crimes to the ICC. The BNP is widely expected to form the next elected government once Bangladesh holds an election, at the end of 2025 or beginning of 2026. Politicians across the spectrum are open to the idea. Tasnim Jara, one of the leaders of the National Citizens’ Party, formed in February out of the movement that toppled Hasina, said, “We remain open to an ICC referral if the domestic process is blocked, compromised, or unable to reach key perpetrators abroad.”.But there is also resistance. Islam told me that involving the ICC was “not realistic in the Bangladeshi context.” According to him, if some cases are tried before the ICC and others in Bangladesh, those tried in Bangladesh will “make a plea that there is discrimination, [which will] potentially hamper the trial process.” Moreover, he added, “the issue of sending cases to the ICC arises when the state is not willing or not capable of trying perpetrators. But Bangladesh is capable and willing.” According to this line of reasoning, since the judiciary in Bangladesh is functional, it is not appropriate to involve the ICC..This is not necessarily true. The ICC’s involvement is governed by the principle of complementarity. This means that the ICC must complement, rather than clash with, domestic processes; it is designed to prevent the ICC from duplicating or complicating the efforts of governments themselves. Complementarity limits the ICC’s involvement to cases where a state either refuses to try a case itself or, alternatively, invites the ICC to help it do so. If the Bangladeshi government were to invite the ICC to investigate and prosecute atrocities committed by Hasina’s government, that would not mean it was admitting to being unable or unwilling to try these cases itself. Rather, it would just mean that the government of Bangladesh has asked for collaborative assistance..According to Yasmin Sooka, a South African expert on transitional justice, this is the best option for Bangladesh now. “Since the investigators and prosecutors in Bangladesh need a great deal of training, they should have a partnership with ICC where they are not cut out completely from the training – a hybrid model where you still have Bangladeshi prosecutors but they work in tandem with ICC prosecutors,” she said. Moreover, any “ICC partnership can actually help the Bangladeshi judiciary,” since the ICC could provide training and oversight. As for ICC involvement in prejudicing trials held in Bangladesh, Sooka said they would only be prejudiced “if their standards are lower.” In other words, if Bangladesh meets international standards in the conduct of its trials, there will be no question of discrimination..Moreover, it is not individual perpetrators that are referred to the ICC; rather, situations or criminal acts are initially referred, and then the perpetrators are identified and prosecuted. It will be up to the government of Bangladesh to work out the details of any collaboration with the ICC; if the BNP or another party forms the next government, it can ask for the investigation to be conducted jointly, with the responsibility for trials divided up in whatever way it sees fit. .This course of action might prevent further politicisation of the justice process in Bangladesh and help anchor a credible narrative of the Hasina government’s culpability among the international community. It will also put India in an awkward position: if the trials of Hasina and the others are conducted in Bangladesh, India can dismiss them as politically motivated, but if they are conducted in the Netherlands, it will be forced to explain to the world why it has continued to shield the perpetrators of internationally adjudicated crimes.