A group of activists in Bangladesh participate in a protest holding photographs of missing persons. They are carrying signs with demands for justice and accountability, one of which reads in English, 'Where are they? Bring them back — alive or accountable! Maayer Daak.' Another sign in Bengali asks why the killers are still free. The protest appears to be organised by families of victims who have killed or disappeared, likely in cases of enforced disappearances.
An April 2025 protest in Dhaka demanding the arrest and trial of alleged perpetrators of enforced disappearances and extra judicial killings during the Sheikh Hasina regime. Bangladesh’s interim government has chosen to pursue accountability through the country’s International Crimes Tribunal, but there are internal weaknesses and problems with the law governing the ICT.IMAGO / NurPhoto

Bangladesh’s flawed attempt at transitional justice after Sheikh Hasina

The Muhammad Yunus-led interim government, constrained by its own limitations and a volatile political climate, risks continuing the abuses of the Sheikh Hasina regime in its efforts at transitional justice

Cyrus Naji was educated at the University of Oxford and the University of St Andrews. From 2022 to 2023, he was a teaching fellow at the Asian University for Women, a private university in Chittagong.

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“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.

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