The death sentence imposed on Sheikh Hasina on November 17 by Bangladesh's International Crimes Tribunal may provoke unease in a lot of quarters. Yet, it represents a hard-won measure of justice for the roughly 1,400 people who perished during last year's July-August uprising.
For many families of the victims, this verdict acknowledges the state's responsibility in the bloodshed, and it breaks a longstanding norm of impunity for the country's most powerful.
Yes, concerns were raised by international rights groups. Human Rights Watch faulted the trial for failing to meet fair-trial standards. Hasina was tried in absentia, lacked a lawyer of her choice, and was not given adequate opportunity to present her defence.
Amnesty International denounced the death penalty as cruel and inhumane, arguing that the process was neither "fair nor just". The United Nations, while calling the verdict an "important moment" for victims, expressed regret over capital punishment, noting that absentia trials with death sentences seriously test international due-process norms.
These critiques deserve attention but they should not blind us to the deeper significance of what just happened.
What the tribunal did was not a perfunctory political hit. Its nearly 500-page judgment is built on rigorous, contemporaneous evidence including audio recordings (some independently verified) implicating Hasina in authorising lethal force, drones, and helicopters against civilians.
The judgment traces a clear chain of command, showing how orders flowed from the top down, and how power was exercised with deadly intent.
This whole process essentially marks a departure from past eras in Bangladesh when trials - even of mass atrocity - were weak on facts, heavy on politics.
The same ICT that tried people accused of war crimes during 1071, for example, often depended on partisan testimony or were mired in executive manipulation.
Here, witnesses were not disappearing, evidence was neither speculative nor manipulated, and the court did not shy away from holding a former prime minister accountable.
True, perfection eludes this trial. An in-absentia death sentence is deeply problematic. But procedural shortcomings do not automatically equal politicisation. The tribunal engaged seriously with command responsibility.
It did not rely on vague rhetoric; rather, it documented how orders were given and executed, and how ordinary citizens died as a result. Bangladesh also recently amended its laws to align more closely with international norms on crimes against humanity, indicating that this was not a narrow, led-by-crisis legal fix, but part of a larger institutional shift.
Dismissing the verdict as mere vengeance misunderstands what most Bangladeshis feel was a reckoning. For decades, the political elite have held unchallenged power, and generations of families have mourned in silence.
This verdict tells them-finally-that their losses matter. It is not about settling old scores. Instead it is about insisting that even a political dynasty must face legal consequences for ordering mass violence.
Beyond the sentence, the tribunal has mandated victim compensation, long-term documentation of abuses, and institutional reform-essentially foundations for genuine redress.
If critics focus only on the fact of the death penalty, they miss this broader architecture: a country very visibly saying that power should not be absolute, that state violence must be answered for, and that collective suffering demands more than platitudes.
Yes, there are risque debates about fairness and international standards. But rejecting the trial wholesale because it wasn't "ideal" risks privileging legal perfection over social truth.
For many in Bangladesh, accountability is more of a promise than an abstract verdict. And in that sense, the Hasina verdict, flawed though it may be, is a necessary and overdue break from a legacy of unpunished power.
(Faisal Mahmud is the Minister (Press) of Bangladesh High Commission in New Delhi)
Disclaimer: These are the personal opinions of the author
