International rights group Human Rights Watch claims Bangladeshi authorities are “failing to uphold international standards” at the International Crimes Tribunal.
In a statement on Tuesday, the group said: “The failures risk denying justice to victims, undermining the rule of law, falsely imprisoning political opponents, and repeating the rights violations of the past.”
On Monday, prosecutors submitted charges of crimes against humanity and genocide against 41 people – including politicians, members of security forces, and journalists accused of human rights violations under Sheikh Hasina’s Awami League government, reports bdnews24.com.
“Those responsible for the many abuses committed under the Sheikh Hasina government should be appropriately held to account, but many prosecutions are falling short of international fair trial standards,” said Meenakshi Ganguly, deputy Asia director at Human Rights Watch.
“Bangladesh needs to urgently reform its criminal justice system, and the new government should ensure that there is no room for political vendettas through shoddy investigations and arbitrary allegations.”
The tribunal is hearing cases related to the crackdown by security forces on student-led protests during the July Uprising that toppled the Awami League government. It is also prosecuting a number of other abuses, including alleged extrajudicial killings and disappearances, committed during Hasina’s rule.
HRW says it is monitoring over a dozen cases at the tribunal and has significant concerns on due process.
“Prosecutors have detained and charged individuals for alleged crimes and in multiple cases relied on witness statements in which incriminating passages appear to have been cut and pasted into multiple statements,” it said.
The tribunal was first established by the Hasina government in 2010 to prosecute crimes against humanity and other war crimes during Bangladesh 1971 Liberation War.
“Those trials, which resulted in six executions, were widely criticised for lack of evidence, political bias, collusion between prosecutors and judges, and absence of basic due process protections,” HRW said.
Since the government changeover following the July Uprising, the interim government amended the law governing the tribunal, allowing it to try additional offences.
The tribunal has completed six trials, convicting 62 people of crimes against humanity. Of these convicts, 42 were tried in absentia, including Hasina herself, and 16 were sentenced to death.
HRW has criticised the amendments to the tribunal law as falling short of “ensuring due process and procedural standards equivalent to international courts dealing with similar offences.”
“The law governing the tribunal still allows prosecutors to order the arrest of individuals without meeting any evidential threshold, to hold detainees for months without written reasons for their detention, and to provide no right of interlocutory appeal to a separate court. Trials can begin three weeks after the prosecution discloses its evidence, leaving little time for adequate defence preparation. Trials in absentia are held without appropriate safeguards including defendants’ right to choose lawyers to represent them. And the tribunal restricts defence lawyers’ ability to cross-examine witnesses,” it added.
HRW also noted the arrest of journalists Mozammel Babu, managing director of Ekattor TV, and Farzana Rupa, a presenter at the network, for their alleged role in covering up the use of excessive force in a crackdown on a protest by Hifazat-e-Islam in May 2013. The two journalists, who worked for a television network that supported the then Awami League government, are accused of helping the government cover up the killings by presenting “false information”.
The journalists’ lawyers told HRW that prosecutors did not provide either of the suspects with a written explanation of the grounds for their arrest, in breach of Article 14 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and as required by Bangladesh’s International Crimes (Tribunal) Act.
The two journalists were also accused in the list of 41 suspects prosecutors submitted to the trial on Jul 27, who stand accused of crimes against humanity.
HRW said it found that tribunal prosecutors and judges are relying on statements recorded by investigating officers that contain passages duplicated across multiple statements, which it says casts doubt on their authenticity.
“One example is the case of Dr Muhammad Hasan Mahmud Chowdhury and others, in which the tribunal set out three charges against 22 Awami League politicians and activists over killings in Chittagong city centre on July 16 and 18, and August 4, 2024. A key part of the prosecution’s evidence are 55 witness statements that have been made public,” HRW said.
“One six-line passage, which appears almost word-for-word in fourteen separate statements, claims that seven named politicians had through their ‘planning, financing, provocation and instructions’ used ‘Awami League terrorists’ to kill six people. A second, longer passage, which appears virtually identically in nine further statements, claims that six of the accused had repeatedly made ‘provocative statements,’ branded the protesters ‘militants, terrorists, and communal agitators,’ and instructed the sixteen other accused to ‘use maximum force to suppress the movement and explicitly ordered the killing and torture of innocent, unarmed, peaceful students and the public.’”
A defence lawyer for one of the accused – senior Awami League politician ABM Fazle Karim, a senior Awami League politician in custody – sent journalists purported recordings of a tribunal prosecutor offering to secure his bail earlier in the year for Tk 10 million. Following the incident, the prosecutor resigned, but the chief prosecutor’s office has not completed its investigation. Meanwhile, judges have proceeded with framing the charges and the trial is to begin on Aug 6.
“Bangladesh authorities need to recognise that they cannot repeat the abuses of the past, when the Awami League conducted political witch-hunts,” Ganguly said. “Allegations based on duplicated witness statements, however, show the lack of a credible justice process, which will once again fail victims, their families, and all Bangladeshis.”