The former prime minister of Bangladesh, sentenced to death for the crackdown on student protests

BarcelonaA court in Bangladesh has sentenced former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina to death, finding her guilty of ordering a brutal crackdown – which left hundreds dead – against the protesters who last year participated in a wave of student-led anti-government protestsHasina has been tried in absentia, as she has been in exile in India since August 2024. when he resigned and fled the country because of the riotsThe International Criminal Tribunal for the former prime minister, which tries war crimes in the country, has found both the former prime minister and her former interior minister and police chief guilty of allowing the use of lethal force against protesters and failing to prevent atrocities committed against them. Before former police chief Abdullah al-Mamun, the only defendant present for the sentencing, the judges read the charges, detailing the scale of the violence in the police action and referencing evidence of how the former prime minister and her inner circle used lethal force to suppress the uprising. Up to 1,400 people are estimated to have died between July 15 and August 5, 2024, most of them victims of gunfire from the country's security forces, according to a United Nations report.

There were cheers and shouts of joy in the courtroom when the verdict was announced, amid tight security. Hasina, who was also sentenced to life imprisonment on charges of crimes against humanity, can still appeal the sentence to the Supreme Court.

The sentence, which ends a trial that lasted months, is the most drastic legal action taken against a former political leader in Bangladesh in decades. Moreover, it comes just a couple of months before the parliamentary elections, scheduled for early February, in which the Awami League party—which Hasina leads—is banned from running.

"A politically motivated farce"

Even before the verdict, the leader accused the court of bias and acknowledged that a guilty verdict was "an inevitable conclusion." "These proceedings are a politically motivated farce," she stated in a Reuters interview last month, criticizing the fact that the court was presided over by an unelected government made up of her "political opponents." She also criticized the fact that she had been denied any real opportunity to defend herself. Students began protesting on the campus of the University of Dhaka, the capital, to denounce a law they considered discriminatory because it reserved more than half of the civil service jobs for certain groups—including the families of veterans who fought in the War of Independence. When the protests were brutally suppressed, they quickly crystallized into a challenge to the government of then-Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, uniting all sectors of the population in a display of the accumulated discontent with a system of abuse of power and the severity with which it treated political dissent.

Since Hasina fled, the country has been led by an interim government. led by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Muhammad Yunus with the aim of holding democratic elections as soon as possible.