A Trial Court in Dhaka, in accordance with the Supreme Court decision that upheld a guilty verdict on the assassination of President Sheikh Mujibur Rahman issued the death warrants for the 5 convicted men who were appealing a High Court verdict on their complicity in the plot.
This is a most historic case because it deals with the burdens of Bangladesh’s post-independence history. Within that history lay dormant the germinal seed of fratricide, which later sprang into the weeded curtains of dictatorship and ad hoc, though seemingly procedural, justice. The man who carried the identity of Bangladesh onto his own shoulders was killed by members of an entity that had helped constitute it: the military. And justice will seem to have been served by the measured long drop.
Bangladesh, along with 7 other countries, that includes Pakistan and Iraq executes its convicts by hanging. This, in spite of the verifiable fact that in the constitution of the People’s Republic of Bangladesh, Article 35(5) states that “no person shall be subjected to cruel, inhuman, or degrading punishment.” This is hardly pleasant company to be in and Bangladesh’s position on capital punishment on its own observed and emerging righteousness on other human rights concerns. This inconsistency has not bypassed the critical attention of Bangladeshi lawyers and thinkers. The Daily Star in 2008 published an interesting history of the death penalty in Bangladesh along with an argument for its abolition based on the benefits of a pluralist criminal justice system that would pick up much of the work now ostensibly done by the capital punishment regime. Find the article here.
Liberal adherents of “moral relativism” might press Bangladesh’s position and back down. Some might suppose that since there is deep disagreement on the right course of justice and no privileged position whatsoever from which to judge the morality of some law, whatever passes as law and custom in one country must be accepted as the uncontested and morally viable law of that country. Moreover since the law of that country is constructed on an armature of contingent history and specific facts, no citizens of another country can legitimate pass critical judgment on any question of morality of law in that country.
This is too quick a move: to go from a Humean defense of morals and laws as historical constructs to an acceptance of a normative regime we find repugnant is indefensible. It merely is the case that there exists insurmountable disagreement on the facts of the matter and their associated normative consequences. It does not follow from this, that we must therefore sit by idly accepting what we might think a blatantly immoral and incoherent program. We need not stand on the sidelines while Bangladesh eats itself like some grotesque Saturn. For, given the history of Bangladeshi politics, the imposition of the death penalty on politically salient cases is tantamount to a god eating his own.
