The death sentence handed down to Bangladesh’s ousted Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina on 17 November brought a sense of relief and justice to the families who lost loved ones during the tumultuous three-week uprising that toppled her regime during the students’ July Uprising last year.
For many among the nation’s 180 million people, the deaths of approximately 1,400 individuals in that short period are a vivid, lived experience. The verdict from the International Crimes Tribunal (ICT)—a domestic court mandated to try those accused of crimes against humanity under Article 7 of the International Criminal Court (ICC)—offers a measure of closure.
Following the verdict, international human rights organisations and independent observers questioned the trial process and the death sentence. Human Rights Watch cited due-process gaps, Amnesty International condemned the use of the death penalty, and credible journalists like David Bergman highlighted flaws in the logical reasoning used to establish Hasina’s command responsibility for the deaths.
However, in the midst of this criticism, often centred on generic “due process gaps” and legal purism, a critical truth is being obscured that the case against Hasina rested upon an evidentiary foundation that was far more substantial and internally consistent than any political trial in Bangladesh’s modern history.
500-page judgment
Evaluated within its social and historical context, the tribunal’s decision, in principle, embodied a “genuine sense” of justice. This case stands out not just for its extensive evidence, which included multiple audio records (some independently verified by BBC and Al Jazeera), but for the unusual clarity in establishing command responsibility.
The tribunal’s nearly 500-page judgment meticulously utilised corroborated witness accounts, expert analyses, and recordings that directly implicated the ousted Prime Minister in the deadly suppression from July to August in 2024.
In sharp contrast to the 1971 war crimes trials, which often relied on vague recollections or partisan testimony before the same ICT, the proceedings against Hasina were widely televised and featured recorded conversations where she authorised lethal drone strikes and armed assaults.
Although some legal experts criticised the trial in absentia as compromising fairness, it must be noted that Hasina chose to flee the proceedings. Bangladesh’s legal framework permits such trials when a defendant absconds, and contrary to the notion of a sham trial, the court ensured representation and admitted extensive documentation.
Invoking Oliver Wendell Holmes’s famous dictum from The Common Law, “The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience,” writer and activist Mustain Zahir argued that the validity of a trial cannot be separated from the social context of a nation seeking accountability after decades of institutionalised violence.
To ignore this, he suggested, shows detachment rather than objectivity. Furthermore, the common comparison local observers make on TV talk shows, contrasting this verdict against Hasina with the 1971 war crimes tribunals, reveals a fundamental misunderstanding, as those earlier trials were, to put it mildly, significantly fragile.
In the previous trials, witness testimony frequently failed under scrutiny, proceedings were marred by political influence, leaked audio records of judges working under the influence of the executive branch were widely circulated, and well-documented incidents like the abduction of witness Sukhranjan Bali cast a damning shadow over the entire process.
It is therefore both striking and significant that none of these signature flaws reappeared in the Hasina case. There were no mysterious witness disappearances, no questionable confessions, no speculative evidentiary leaps, and certainly no coercion of judges.
The prosecution instead built its case using contemporary documentation, forensic analysis, retrieved original audio recordings, and testimony from survivors who recounted events from just a year earlier.
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Imperfect but legitimate
While this trial was certainly not perfect—as no in absentia proceeding can ever fully meet ideal international standards—imperfection should not be equated with illegitimacy.
The tribunal demonstrated serious legal engagement, particularly with questions of command responsibility and state violence, meticulously detailing the chain of command through which lethal orders were issued, operations planned, and force deployed.
Moreover, Bangladesh’s recent amendments to its International Crimes Act, which expanded the definitions of crimes against humanity and clarified jurisdiction, were not rushed adaptations for this case, but part of a sustained effort to bring the justice system in line with developing international norms.
The haste—criticised by observers—was driven by the urgent necessity of a society determined to prevent its most powerful figure from using impunity as a shield. Consequently, the automatic framing of the verdict as a political vendetta fails to grasp the truth that most Bangladeshis instinctively understand that this moment signifies a rupture with the culture of untouchability that has characterised the nation’s political elite for generations.
The families who lost loved ones in the July 2024 massacre—students who were shot, beaten, or disappeared—are simply demanding that a head of government who authorised mass violence be held to the same moral and legal standards as any other perpetrator of state crimes.
For the victims’ families, justice surely is not found in abstract debates about procedural form, but in the crucial acknowledgement that the state was responsible for killing its citizens and can no longer deny the truth.
Similarly, the fixation of international human rights organisations and observers on the death sentence obscures the judgment’s broader architecture. Beyond the sentence, the tribunal mandated compensation, documentation of all victims, and significant institutional reforms designed to prevent future state abuses.
The verdict essentially underscored a generation’s collective suffering and the state’s collective responsibility to repair the damage. To focus narrowly on the punishment is to miss the deeper societal transformation underway: a society, long caught in cycles of authoritarianism, is imperfectly and haltingly constructing a politics where power is constrained rather than absolute.
The Hasina trial thus represents an inflection point in the struggle to place citizens above rulers, prevent the next massacre, and insist that even entrenched political dynasties are accountable for state crimes.
The process should not be romanticised, but neither should one dismiss the profound truth it signifies: a country long denied justice is finally beginning to demand it.
Faisal Mahmud is the minister (Press) of the Bangladesh High Commission in New Delhi. His X handle is @faisal_reports. Views are personal.
(Edited by Saptak Datta)