Dhaka, July 22 (IANS) The sentencing of Hasanul Huq Inu, former Bangladesh Minister and President of Jatiya Samajtantrik Dal (JSD), to 10-year imprisonment by the country’s International Crimes Tribunal (ICT) on three charges of crimes against humanity linked to July 2024 protests was not supported by sufficient evidence, a report has stated.
Describing the verdict as a “miscarriage of justice”, journalist David Bergman said that the acquittals, convictions, and the reasoning outlined in the summary judgment pointed to the same underlying failure: that the “decisions have been made without the evidence base needed to justify prosecutions for offences as serious as these”.
“The claim that can arguably be made is that at each stage — charge framing, prosecution, and now judgement—decision-makers reasoned backwards from a presumption of Inu’s guilt rather than forward from the evidence actually before them,” Bergman wrote in Bangladesh’s newspaper Daily Waadaa.
He noted that the June 30 verdict acquitted Inu on five charges but sentenced the former minister to 10 years’ imprisonment on each of the three convictions, with the sentences to run concurrently.
“The five acquittals should prompt serious scrutiny of the original decisions by both ICT prosecutors and ICT judges to have allowed these charges to proceed to trial at all: specifically, the decision by prosecutors to include these allegations in their formal charge application, and the subsequent decision by the Tribunal to agree to frame the charges,” Bergman stated.
“This is because it was clear at a very early stage that the evidential foundation of these charges against Inu was either extremely weak or entirely non-existent, and they did not, arguably, meet the evidentiary thresholds required before the Tribunal may lawfully prosecute,” he added.
According to the report, Inu openly criticised the aspects of the July 2024 protests, while consistently alleging that the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) and Jamaat-e-Islami—whom he occasionally characterised as “terrorists or militants” — had orchestrated the demonstrations.
The report noted that Inu had also been a longstanding political ally of former Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, adding that the lack of evidence supporting most of the charges suggested his political associations, rather than a sound evidentiary foundation, were the driving factor behind his prosecution
“As for the judges, there must be questions about whether, at the stages of both cognisance and charge-framing, they conducted proper scrutiny of the charges, considered the necessary legal tests constituting the offence, and the evidence provided by the prosecution,” it stressed.
Emphasising that criminal convictions must rest on evidence rather than political associations, the report said, “But the ICT’s purpose is to deliver justice according to law, which requires independent consideration of the evidence before it, of the factual and legal precedents within international criminal law, and of the complex legal tests that must be satisfied to prove the offence of crimes against humanity, and not to allocate blame according to political affiliation.”
–IANS
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