Hasanul Huq Inu, former Bangladesh minister and president of the Jatiya Samajtantrik Dal (JSD), was sentenced to 10 years' imprisonment by the country's International Crimes Tribunal (ICT) on three charges of crimes against humanity linked to the July 2024 protests — a verdict that a new report argues was not supported by sufficient evidence and amounts to a 'miscarriage of justice'.

The Verdict and Its Findings

The ICT delivered its ruling on 30 June, acquitting Inu on five charges while convicting him on three, with each 10-year sentence to run concurrently. Journalist David Bergman, writing in Bangladesh's newspaper Daily Waadaa, described the outcome as a 'miscarriage of justice', arguing that the acquittals, convictions, and the reasoning in the summary judgment all pointed to the same underlying failure.

'The decisions have been made without the evidence base needed to justify prosecutions for offences as serious as these,' Bergman wrote.

Allegations of Reasoning Backwards from Guilt

Bergman's analysis contends that at every stage — charge framing, prosecution, and final judgement — decision-makers reasoned backwards from a presumption of Inu's guilt rather than forward from the evidence actually before them. He argued that the five acquittals should prompt serious scrutiny of the original decisions by both ICT prosecutors and judges to have allowed the charges to proceed to trial at all.

'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,' Bergman stated.

Political Context and Associations

According to the report, Inu had openly criticised aspects of the July 2024 protests and had repeatedly alleged that the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) and Jamaat-e-Islami — whom he occasionally characterised as 'terrorists or militants' — had orchestrated the demonstrations. He was also a longstanding political ally of former Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina.

The report suggests that his political associations, rather than a sound evidentiary foundation, may have been the driving factor behind his prosecution — a charge that raises fundamental questions about the independence of the tribunal's proceedings.

Questions Over Judicial Scrutiny

Bergman raised pointed questions about whether the judges, at the stages of both cognisance and charge-framing, conducted proper scrutiny of the charges, considered the necessary legal tests constituting the offence, and examined the evidence provided by the prosecution.

'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,' the report emphasised.

What This Means Going Forward

The report's findings are likely to intensify scrutiny of the ICT's handling of cases stemming from the July 2024 unrest in Bangladesh. Critics argue that the tribunal must demonstrate genuine independence if its verdicts are to carry credibility under international criminal law standards. The case of Hasanul Huq Inu may set a precedent for how future prosecutions linked to the protests are evaluated — both domestically and by international observers.