The Bangladesh government’s International Crimes Tribunal today found deposed Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina guilty of crimes against humanity and sentenced her to death. It marks an unprecedented moment in the South Asian country’s legal and political history, with rare unity between the judiciary and the prosecution in the prosecution of a former prime minister. The Tribune of 21st-century Bangladesh should be judged by its verdict. The Prime Minister and Leader of the Bangladesh Awami League party stands accused of orchestrating mass killings and other grave human rights violations. At the center of this historic moment are two men whose integrity has won them a particular place in public consciousness. Chief Prosecutor Muhammad Tajul Islam and Tribunal Justice Muhammad Golam Murtaza Majumdar have, in the eyes of many Bangladeshis, reshaped what is possible within the law and in the country’s political imagination.
When Muhammad Tajul Islam told a crowd, “No one on earth can buy my prosecution team in exchange for all the wealth in the world,” he meant it. He said it with the weight of experience behind it. “Neither the Awami League nor the fourteen generations of her (Hasina’s) lineage will have the power to buy us with money, wealth, temptations, or threats,” he said. “Insha’Allah, no such force will ever have that strength.” Few who heard him doubted the rhetoric. Few who had spent decades watching Bangladesh’s tumultuous authoritarian history doubted the possibility.
Tajul Islam was speaking to the families of the dead and the injured. To the citizens whose government had ordered the military to open fire on peaceful protesters and had directed the mobilization of its security forces against its own people. These families had every reason to mistrust the state. They had every reason to suspect the powerful would go free. In that context, the Chief Prosecutor offered something fragile and crucial: hope. Hope that justice, if it was done right, could be used as a bulwark against tyranny.
In retrospect, we know he was right. In a single year, he and his team completed investigations into eight major cases and filed formal charges, conducted arguments, and brought the cases to a verdict-waiting stage. For a judicial process that is known, even by domestic critics, for working at a glacial pace, this was not just impressive; it was unprecedented. But it was not the speed of the process that was striking. It was the fearlessness behind it.
Bangladesh, for the first time in its history, has military and paramilitary officers, active and retired, on trial in a civilian court on charges of enforced disappearances and unlawful killings. It was not only breaking with precedent. It was breaking with a culture. In every country in South Asia, the military is the most difficult institution to hold to civilian oversight or to the rule of law, both formally and through networks of informal power. To see a civilian law enforcement agency not only initiate but also prosecute those cases to a point of verdicts was, in that sense, revolutionary. Tajul Islam and his team showed the republic cannot have permanent sacred cows. They showed justice, if it is to be justice, cannot exempt any uniform, office, or political pedigree.
Of course, all these cases are essential. But the case that would define this generation is the case against Hasina, naming her the prime accused in the killing of protesters during the July uprising. The Tribunal, having heard the prosecution’s evidence and scheduled the judgment, is expected to impose the highest punishment. The prosecution presented an overwhelming body of evidence that Hasina, as the head of the government at the time, had ordered an assault on unarmed protesters. Helicopter gunship fire, targeted killings and disappearances, and the mobilization of partisan loyalists were part of a coordinated effort to quell the people’s calls for justice and democratic rights. In short, it was a massacre by the state, in every sense.
The evidence presented to the Tribunal, which the defense neither denied nor could deny, included audio recordings, witness testimony, official orders, military communications records, and forensic evidence. The prosecution put forth a strong case. But it also argued that the highest punishment was the only punishment proportionate to the crime. Thus, the trial was not only an examination of the events of the uprising, but a reckoning with the culture of impunity Bangladeshis had lived with since 1971.
Appearing before the Tribunal, Tajul Islam articulated the broader resonance of the moment. “I am not just a lawyer. I am a bearer of testimony from a blood-soaked chapter of history. This trial is not revenge for the past; it is a pledge for the future, so that no dictator, intoxicated by power, can again soak his feet in the blood of this nation’s children.” This is not legalese. This is the language of a national conscience. Tajul Islam was not just prosecuting the case. He was testifying to a nation’s collective trauma.
His biography helps explain why he speaks so powerfully. Born and raised in Bangladesh, a graduate of Rajshahi University’s Law Department with Honors and Master’s degrees, he began practising law in 1998 and joined the bar in 1999. Over more than two decades as a legal professional, he built a reputation as a lawyer of unwavering professional and personal standards. The one time he came into contact with the International Crimes Tribunal was as Lead Defense Counsel from 2010 to 2014, giving him an uncommon understanding of the technicalities of prosecuting war crimes and human rights violations. But his integrity came at a cost. In 2015, under the Hasina government, he was briefly jailed, a clear signal from the government to legal professionals: criticism, even from those within the system, would not be tolerated.
Tajul Islam was not intimidated. Instead, he made that experience part of the armor he put on when he returned to service years later as the chief prosecutor. The chief prosecutor had also worked with law firms in England, including the chambers of Anthony Berry QC and Steven K-QC, and had travelled to 23 countries in the course of his legal work. In other words, Tajul Islam was a professional shaped by both the global legal environment and the harsh realities of Bangladeshi politics. His certainty comes from experience and conviction, not from bravado.
If the Chief Prosecutor was the firm hand of the prosecution, the pillar of the judiciary during this turbulent trial was Justice Muhammad Golam Murtaza Majumdar. He, too, made a public statement after the sentencing, and in it is a sense of the context under which he was passing the judgment. “To deliver the death sentence against Sheikh Hasina,” he said, “I had to face many obstacles, even death threats. They threatened to abduct my family. But I remained firm and unshakable in my principles.” He went on to pray: “May Almighty Allah grant me the strength to remain steadfast on the truth until the last moment of my life. Ameen.”
Judges do not make such statements carelessly. When they speak of the pressures and the violence and the risk of their jobs, they are speaking as front-line combatants in a nation’s battle against authoritarianism. Justice Majumdar’s courage is not just a man speaking; it is a man speaking. It is the symbol of a larger truth: justice in such cases is never done safely. It is never done by those willing to fade into retirement quietly. It is done by those who, in the cause of defending the rule of law, have risked everything.
The joint fortitude of the prosecutor and the judge created a rare moment in Bangladeshi political history, a confluence of institutional courage, public pressure for accountability, and integrity within the justice system. For a nation long traumatized by politically motivated killings, coups, rigged trials, and impunity for elites, this verdict offers a different signal. A signal that power alone does not guarantee impunity. A signal that even the most entrenched political families can be held to account if institutions can stand up.
It is also a signal for vigilance. Justice delivered must be protected. The people who targeted the prosecutor and the judge have not gone away. They are waiting for the moment to strike back. The older culture of intimidation and ruling by fear has not been exorcised by this single verdict. Unless the public remains vigilant, the courage of these two men will remain an outlier, a heroic exception, rather than the new normal.
The July 2024 uprising was a watershed moment in Bangladesh’s political development. Revolutions, though, do not write constitutions. Courts do. Mass movements do not determine political culture. Courtroom decisions do. The Tribunal’s verdict, starting with Hasina’s death sentence, opens the door to a more honest and forthright reckoning with the past. It provides the victims with a long-denied measure of validation. And it will burden the state with a moral responsibility never to allow such crimes to be repeated.
This is not an op-ed celebrating the punishment. It is an op-ed about justice. Death sentences are irreversible, and with good reason. But when a head of state uses the resources of the state to commit mass murder, accountability is the only way out, not for the sake of vengeance, but for the sake of the nation. No democracy can last long if the citizenry knows their lives are easily disposable in the service of a leader’s ambition.
The extraordinary example of integrity set by Chief Prosecutor Tajul Islam and Justice Majumdar offers a model for the rest of the world to follow. When authoritarian violence is confronted within the system of law, and when that confrontation is as forthright and as just as it can be, even the most brutal regimes can be reined in. Their example serves as a model for lawyers, judges, and citizens across South Asia and around the world. The truth is not just a legal standard. It is also a choice. It is a choice that human beings must make, and continue to make, if justice is to prevail.