The parliament’s ongoing review of the interim government’s 133 ordinances is perhaps the first real test of whether the July uprising has changed only the occupants of power, or the logic of power itself. The special committee reviewing the ordinances will reportedly place its report in parliament on April 2, with any ordinances not enacted within the remainder of the 30-day deadline lapsing automatically. Among the 133 ordinances, there are two that I think should be treated as non-negotiable democratic safeguards: the Supreme Court Secretariat Ordinance, 2025 and the Supreme Court Judges’ Appointment Ordinance, 2025. If the House lets either of these lapse or be compromised, it would not be preserving parliamentary supremacy—it would be restoring executive supremacy over the judiciary. That would be a grave mistake.
This decision cannot be made in a vacuum. The February 12 election came after a mass uprising that, according to the UN Human Rights Office, may have cost as many as 1,400 lives. The uprising was not a revolt against one ruler. It was a revolt against a system that had turned elections into rituals and institutions into extensions of the executive. As we now know, the destruction of the caretaker framework in 2011 did not produce constitutional normalcy, but rather three increasingly disputed elections while collapsing public faith. That is why judicial independence is not some elite legal preoccupation; it sits at the heart of why the old order fell.
The review judgment on the 13th Amendment should have ended any attempt to treat this as ordinary politics. In the full judgment released on March 12, 2026, the Appellate Division used language that should unsettle every MP. It referred to the abolition of the caretaker system as the “judicial murder of democracy.” It then went further. At pages 59 and 60, the court accepted the challenge over the discrepancy between the 2011 short order and the later full judgment, and observed that the 15th Amendment, enacted in the gap between the two, effectively signalled, even dictated, the fate of the caretaker system to the judiciary. More damningly, the court said the judiciary appeared to have buckled under legislative pressure. When a Supreme Court says an earlier constitutional judgment may have been bent by politics, the parliament cannot honestly say that proper judicial reform is not crucial.
Bangladesh has already paid the price of a judiciary seen as vulnerable to power. Former Chief Justice SK Sinha resigned amid intense government backlash over the 16th Amendment verdict and later sought political asylum abroad. In August 2024, Chief Justice Obaidul Hassan and five other Appellate Division judges resigned amid protests, leaving only one appellate judge in place. One may disagree with how those exits happened. But no honest observer can deny what they revealed: public confidence in judicial neutrality had been shattered. A judiciary feared by citizens and managed by the government cannot anchor a democracy.
That is why the High Court’s landmark ruling on judicial autonomy and the later issuance of the Supreme Court Secretariat Ordinance in 2025 matter so much. The court addressed a structural defect that has poisoned judicial independence for decades by restoring Supreme Court authority over the posting, promotion, and disciplining of lower court judges, and by directing the creation of a separate judicial secretariat. Without an autonomous secretariat, talk of independence remains theatrical. A judge may write a brave order, but if decisions on postings, promotions, discipline, staffing, and budget still remain on executive hands, the system stays compromised. Administrative dependence is political dependence in slower form.
The same logic applies to the Supreme Court Judges’ Appointment Ordinance. Bangladesh has spent years pretending that constitutional consultation was enough to ensure fair appointments, while everyone knew informal political filtering remained decisive. The 2025 ordinance at least creates a statutory framework and a council-based process for choosing judges, and appointments have already been made under it. This is not merely a theoretical reform. Its necessity has already received judicial endorsement. In Writ Petition No. 3936 of 2025, the High Court Division acknowledged defects in how the constitutional appointment scheme has worked in practice, noting concerns about non-merit based appointments and the resulting damage to the judiciary’s image. It recognised that the ordinance was introduced to address these shortcomings by limiting political influence, and described it as desirable for the “great interest of the nation,” while leaving room for parliamentary refinement (pp. 10-12).
Yes, the law can be improved. The parliament can debate stronger transparency rules, clearer criteria, public disclosure standards, and conflict-of-interest safeguards. It can question particular design choices. But scrapping or diluting the ordinance in any form would mean returning to opacity, patronage, and whispered vetting by the executive. That would be reform in reverse.
The argument that the parliament should refuse these ordinances because they were promulgated by an unelected interim government misses the point. The question is not who issued them, but whether the ordinances cure a documented constitutional illness. On that score, both ordinances do. One gives the judiciary an administrative spine; the other begins to shield appointments from naked political capture. Neither is perfect, but both are necessary. BNP now governs with a large mandate earned in the first genuinely competitive election in years. That gives it authority, but it also imposes restraint.
If the government wants to prove it is not merely the latest beneficiary of Bangladesh’s winner-takes-all state, it should pass these two ordinances, improve them if needed, and entrench them as part of a broader constitutional settlement. If it lets them lapse or be compromised, the message will be unmistakable: reform was useful as a slogan in opposition, but inconvenient when in office. Bangladesh knows what happens when courts are bent, intimidated, bypassed, or packed. It knows what follows when electoral legitimacy collapses and judges are treated as instruments, obstacles, or targets. The parliament should therefore preserve these two ordinances—if nothing else, as a debt to the July martyrs, to the voters who reclaimed their franchise, and to the future of constitutional rule.
Barrister Khan Khalid Adnan is advocate of the Supreme Court of Bangladesh, fellow at the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators, and head of the chamber at Khan Saifur Rahman and Associates in Dhaka.
Views expressed in this article are the author's own.
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