Given the sensitivity of Bangladesh’s first-ever trials of serving senior army officers for the offence of crimes against humanity, one would reasonably expect the International Crimes Tribunal to be particularly careful in complying with all procedural requirements of the law, so as to ensure that the process -- at least insofar as the judges’ decision making was concerned -- would be beyond reproach.
Yet in three ongoing prosecutions involving military officers -- belonging respectively to the army’s intelligence agency (DGFI), the Border Guard Bangladesh (BGB) and the Rapid Action Battalion (Rab -- the judges of the International Crimes Tribunal (ICT) have arguably abandoned such caution.
In a highly unusual move, the Tribunal commenced the trials -- with the prosecution delivering its opening statement and calling its first witness -- without first providing the lawyers of the accused with a copy of the charge framing order.
This omission is significant for two reasons. First, without the written charge framing order, defence counsel could not know with precision the legal charges on which their clients were being tried. Second, in the absence of that order, defence counsel had effectively been prevented from exercising their statutory right to challenge the order, before the trial starts, by way of a review application.
The right to review
One of the most significant restrictions in the law governing the ICT -- unchanged from the law that governed the earlier iteration of the Tribunal that prosecuted the 1971 war crimes -- is that defendants have a right of appeal only against a conviction, and not against any other order of the Tribunal. This leaves Bangladesh’s ICT defendants with fewer procedural protections than those tried in the country’s ordinary criminal courts, where the Criminal Procedure Code applies, or before other international tribunals, where interlocutory orders may be appealed.
That said, rules 26(3) and 26(4) of the ICT Rules of Procedure do at least allow defendants to file an application with the Tribunal seeking a “review” of an earlier order it has already passed. While such applications have a very limited prospect of success -- since they require the Tribunal to acknowledge that its own previous order was erroneous, and very few defence review applications have succeeded in the Tribunal’s history -- they nevertheless provide an important right. At a minimum, they allow the defence to place alleged errors formally on the record, which may later be relevant on appeal. And, from a defence perspective, one never knows when a court might acknowledge the “errors” of its ways.
Starting the trial prior to review
On 18 December 2025, Tribunal-1 passed an order in open court framing charges against 13 individuals in connection with alleged unlawful detentions and enforced disappearances carried out between 2015 and 2024 at the Joint Interrogation Centre, under the control of the Directorate General of Forces Intelligence (DGFI).
Those charged include former prime minister Sheikh Hasina; her security and defence adviser, Tarique Siddiqui; five former directors general of DGFI; and six former directors of DGFI’s Counter Terrorism and Intelligence Bureau (CTIB). Out of them, only three former CTIB directors are currently in custody; the remaining accused are absconding.
On the same day the order was delivered, counsel for the three accused in the dock applied for a certified copy of the charge framing order. This was necessary both to understand precisely the charges against their clients and to enable them to file a review application. One cannot file a review application without a certified copy of the order.
However, by 19 January 2026 -- the date on which the Tribunal had earlier ruled that the trial was due to begin -- the defence had still not received a copy of the charge framing order.
The lawyers must have assumed that when they came to the court that day, the Tribunal would adjourn proceedings. However, they were surprised to learn that the court expected the trial to start.
At the hearing, defence counsel argued that the trial could not lawfully commence until they had received the charge framing order, exercised their right to seek a review, and the Tribunal had disposed of that application.
The Tribunal however, under significant pressure from the prosecution who argued that the defence lawyers were simply wasting time, rejected this submission and permitted the prosecution to proceed with its opening statement and to call its first witness, Hummam Quader Chowdhury.
The judges made one concession: defence counsel would be permitted to defer cross-examination of the witness until after the review application had been decided.
However this concession did not correct the procedural error of starting a trial without providing the defence a copy of the charge framing order and allowing them to exercise their legal right of filing a review application. Once the Tribunal had chosen to commence the trial, it is difficult to see how it could, with genuine objectivity, later consider a review application challenging the charge framing order, having already acted upon that very order by allowing the trial to proceed. It would, for example, be very embarrassing for the Tribunal if it were now to end the trial against any of the accused having already started to hear evidence.
The Trial continues
On the following day, 20 January, the defence counsel finally did receive a certified copy of the charge framing order and on 22 January, they filed their application for review that was due to take place Sunday, 25 January. On Sunday, the defence counsel’s senior lawyer was ill and a new date on Tuesday, 27 January was given. However, although the Tribunal had still not disposed of the defence counsel’s review application concerning the charge framing order, the judges -- with the prosecution backing -- insisted on continuing with the trial, and ordered the examination of a second witness.
Tajul Islam, the chief prosecutor, defended the ICT. “It is not mentioned anywhere in the law that all the proceeding[s] shall be stopped while an order is being reviewed by the Tribunal,” he claimed. He also blamed the defence counsel for not mentioning the “unavailability of the certified copy to the court” in the four weeks before the trial was due to start -- though in response the defence counsel say that they were regularly in touch with the registrar office in this period.
Tajul also mentioned that Hummam Quader Chowdhury, who is contesting the elections, could only be available on 19 January to give evidence.
A similar pattern of events has emerged in proceedings concerning the prosecution of Rab officers (also involving allegations of enforced disappearances), as well as in the prosecution of BGB officers (in relation to killings during the July 2024 protests).
This sequence of events allows people to argue that the International Crimes Tribunal wants to push through with these trials, without sufficient consideration of due process or compliance with judicial norms.
