Detained, Not Convicted

It has now been two years since the ousting of Sheikh Hasina. Governments have fallen, slogans have changed, and promises of a new political culture have echoed across the country.

Yet one institution seems almost entirely immune to political transition: Our prisons. They remain crowded with men and women whose cases crawl through the judicial system for years, whose charges are tenuous at best, or whose continued detention appears to have become an administrative convenience rather than a legal necessity.

A government may inherit many problems from its predecessor. It cannot, however, indefinitely inherit its excuses.

One of the Awami League government's most enduring criticisms was its unabashed weaponization of the criminal justice system. Arrests became instruments of political expediency, dissent was frequently conflated with criminality, and prolonged detention often preceded, rather than followed, any meaningful judicial determination.

It was precisely this culture that many hoped would end with political change. Instead, what has emerged is an uncomfortable continuity.

The interim administration repeatedly assured the public that the rule of law would once again become the cornerstone of governance. There were pledges of judicial independence, institutional reform, and a decisive departure from politically motivated prosecutions.

Yet many detainees remained behind bars with little visible progress on their cases, while the glacial pace of legal proceedings continued to deny them the justice that had been so loudly promised.

The Bangladesh Nationalist Party has now been in office since February, but the prison gates still tell the same story.

Justice delayed has long been recognized as justice denied. Less frequently acknowledged is that justice indefinitely postponed transforms into punishment without conviction.

In June, Home Minister Salahuddin Ahmed informed parliament that the country's 75 jails were holding 77,040 prisoners against an approved capacity of 45,136, and conceded that accommodation problems existed in some of them.

Pre-trial detention was never intended to become a substitute for sentencing. It exists to ensure public safety, prevent interference with investigations, or guarantee a defendant's appearance before the court.

The presumption of innocence, one of the oldest principles of modern jurisprudence, loses all practical meaning if an acquittal arrives only after years spent inside a prison cell.

Of course, no serious observer would argue that every detainee is innocent or that dangerous offenders should simply be released in the name of compassion.

Public safety matters. Criminal accountability matters. Victims deserve justice no less than the accused deserve due process. But these principles are not mutually exclusive. Indeed, the rule of law demands that they coexist.

A functioning justice system must be capable of distinguishing between those who genuinely threaten society and those who have simply become collateral damage in an overburdened or politicized legal apparatus.

Bangladesh's courts already struggle under an enormous backlog of pending cases, a reality that successive governments have acknowledged but failed to meaningfully address.

Yet administrative inefficiency cannot become a permanent justification for depriving citizens of their liberty.

The state cannot imprison first and investigate later. Nor can it treat prolonged incarceration as an acceptable consequence of bureaucratic inertia.

Bangladesh has spent years debating elections, constitutions, and political transitions. They are undoubtedly important, but none of it amounts to much if the ordinary citizen cannot rely on a justice system that is timely, impartial, and faithful to due process.

Democracy is not vindicated simply because governments change. It is vindicated when institutions do.

If our prisons continue to hold people whose guilt the state cannot promptly establish, then it matters little which party happens to be in power. A democracy cannot claim to have turned a new page while its justice system continues to operate by the old rules.

Two Augusts ago, Bangladesh demanded more than a change of government; it demanded a different relationship between the citizen and the state, one in which the law applied equally to everyone, including those whom the government of the day finds politically inconvenient.

That was the promise. Judging by where we stand today, it remains unfulfilled.