Khan Khalid Adnan

A country that has lived through secret detention sites, enforced disappearances, extrajudicial killings, and the slaughter of July protesters does not strengthen its human rights architecture by reviving a weaker watchdog.

With regard to the preservation of our judicial autonomy, the real question was never whether Bangladesh would aspire to achieve it, but whether the state was prepared to surrender the administrative levers through which the courts are quietly managed.

The real question before parliament now is brutally simple. Does it want an independent judiciary, or merely a friendlier one?

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 review bench has acknowledged that constitutional formalism helped wreck electoral credibility in Bangladesh.

In the American case, the resolution exposes the gap between what US officials on the ground knew in 1971 and what the US state was willing to admit.

Bangladesh has just staged a rare democratic exercise: a parliamentary election and a referendum on constitutional reform on the same day.

Epstein’s is not only a story of individual depravity, but of institutional deference to wealth and status.