A leading British-Bangladeshi barrister specialising in international criminal law has described Bangladesh’s recently revived International Crimes Tribunal (ICT-BD) as a politically biased “show trial” that fails every accepted global standard for prosecuting genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.
In his latest podcast released on Friday, Barrister Monirul Islam declared that the ICT-BD proceedings against five-time Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina and senior Awami League figures represent “not justice, but vengeance” carried out by the very political forces defeated in the 1971 Liberation War.
Drawing on landmark precedents, including the 1961 Eichmann trial in Israel and the 1998–2000 Pinochet case in the United Kingdom, the barrister emphasised that while any country has universal jurisdiction to try the four core international crimes (aggression, genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes), the process must be manifestly impartial. In the Pinochet case, a single Law Lord’s prior association with Amnesty International was enough for the House of Lords to set aside its own ruling on grounds of “apparent bias.”
By contrast, Monirul Islam pointed out that several judges currently sitting on the ICT-BD have open histories of political activism against Sheikh Hasina, including former leadership roles in the BNP’s lawyers’ wing. At least one judge, he stated, has never previously sat on the High Court or Supreme Court bench, even for a single day. The tribunal’s chairman was on leave during critical periods, while the remaining judges heard evidence on alternate days and in shifts, violating the tribunal’s own procedural rules.
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What took two to four years in the 2010–2015 war-crimes trials has, under the present process, been compressed into just four months. Even David Bergman, the foreign journalist who was once the most vocal against the trial of Jamaat’s war criminals at the ICT-BD, has now publicly stated in Prothom Alo that the current proceedings are “deeply questionable.”
Monirul Islam concluded that the defeated collaborators of 1971 are now using a tribunal bearing the name of international justice to settle political scores through a rushed and overtly partisan procedure that no credible court in the world would recognise as fair.
He ended his address by pledging that the current “communal and fundamentalist” political order would eventually collapse, and Bangladesh would be restored to what he described as the secular and humane path set in 1971.
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