When a State Executes, Who Protects Its Citizens?

Two Bangladeshi citizens have been executed in Saudi Arabia. The public has been told that they engaged in “immoral acts” in a mosque in the Mecca region. What precisely constituted the alleged offence, however, remains unclear in the publicly available account. Whether they received meaningful consular assistance throughout their detention and trial is also unclear.

Yet one decision is irreversible: The state has taken their lives.

That asymmetry should disturb us. The accusation is vague to the outside world; the judicial record is inaccessible to most readers; the history of diplomatic contact is disputed or incomplete. The punishment, meanwhile, is final. When the state exercises its most extreme power, opacity cannot be treated as a minor procedural inconvenience.

According to reports citing the Saudi Ministry of Interior, Nazrul Islam Abdul Bashir and Siti Akter were executed in the Mecca region in October 2026 following convictions arising from conduct described as immoral inside a mosque. The sentence was reportedly imposed as ta’zir, a category in Islamic jurisprudence in which punishment is determined through judicial or state discretion rather than a fixed scriptural penalty.

The Saudi account says the judgment passed through appellate review and was approved for implementation. That establishes what the authorities say happened. It does not independently establish the underlying facts, the adequacy of legal representation or the proportionality of the sentence.

The first question, then, is elementary: What was the offence? “Immorality” is a moral judgment, not a sufficiently informative public description of conduct for evaluating a death sentence. Religious prohibition, social disapproval and criminal culpability may overlap, but they are not interchangeable.

Even if the allegation were substantiated, the existence of wrongdoing would not by itself establish that execution was a legitimate or proportionate response.

Three principles matter here: legality, proportionality, and due process. People must know the precise accusation against them; criminal punishment must bear a defensible relationship to the gravity of the offence; and defendants must be able to understand the proceedings, challenge evidence, obtain competent legal counsel and pursue effective review.

The heavier the penalty, the greater the need for scrutiny. Death is uniquely resistant to correction. An erroneous prison sentence can sometimes be overturned. An execution cannot.

The ta’zir classification makes the question of proportionality especially salient. It indicates a punishment shaped by discretionary legal judgment, rather than a single mandatory punishment prescribed for every instance of the alleged conduct.

It would be irresponsible to pronounce on the merits of a judgment without the case record. It is entirely responsible, however, to ask why death was considered necessary, whether less severe penalties were available, and what safeguards constrained that discretion.

International human-rights standards provide a further point of reference. The UN Human Rights Committee’s General Comment No. 36 interprets the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights as restricting the death penalty, where it has not been abolished, to the “most serious crimes,” understood as crimes of extreme gravity involving intentional killing.

Saudi Arabia is not a party to that covenant, so its treaty obligations cannot simply be assumed from the Committee’s interpretation. Nevertheless, the standard offers a compelling measure of the distance between capital punishment for non-lethal conduct and contemporary human-rights principles.

Bangladesh’s responsibility is a separate, equally urgent question. Reports say the Bangladesh consulate in Jeddah was not informed before the executions and subsequently approached Saudi authorities through diplomatic channels. That allegation deserves investigation.

But legal precision matters: Failure to give a diplomatic mission advance notice of an execution does not, by itself, establish a breach of Article 36 of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations.

Article 36 requires authorities to inform a detained foreign national without delay of the right to consular notification. If that person requests it, the receiving state must inform the relevant consular post without delay. The Convention also protects consular communication and access, subject to its provisions.

The decisive questions are therefore whether the two Bangladeshis were told of these rights, whether they requested notification, whether the mission was informed when required, and whether meaningful access was afforded. These are questions for documents, dates and testimony, not rhetorical certainty.

The distinction is not legal pedantry. It is the difference between an accusation that can be dismissed as overstatement and a properly grounded demand for accountability. In LaGrand (Germany v. United States, 2001) and Jadhav (India v. Pakistan, 2019), the International Court of Justice addressed violations of consular rights under the Vienna Convention.

Those cases demonstrate that consular notification is not merely a diplomatic courtesy. They do not mean, however, that every consular dispute automatically gives Bangladesh access to the Court: Jurisdiction depends on the applicable legal instruments and states’ consent.

What, then, should Dhaka do?

It should request the arrest and detention records, the charging instrument, trial and appellate judgments, information on legal counsel and interpretation, records of consular-rights notification, any consular correspondence and the chronology of the execution decision.

The families should be given a clear account of what is known, what remains contested and what remedies may exist. Where evidence establishes a violation, Bangladesh should make a specific legal and diplomatic claim, rather than confining itself to a generic expression of concern.

Yet this case cannot be understood solely through international law. It also exposes the political economy of Bangladeshi citizenship abroad. Saudi Arabia is a major destination for Bangladeshi labour migration, and the relationship carries substantial economic importance.

That asymmetry creates an uncomfortable question: When a labour-sending state relies on access to a destination country’s employment market, does it become more reluctant to confront that country over the rights of its own nationals?

This is a question about structures and incentives, not an assertion that a particular official has deliberately traded away these defendants’ rights. Labour-exporting economies may celebrate overseas citizens as contributors to foreign-exchange earnings while underinvesting in the legal institutions that protect them when they are detained, injured, abused or killed.

The language of national pride can coexist with a hierarchy of practical protection. A wealthy traveller and a low-wage migrant may hold identical passports yet possess profoundly unequal capacity to mobilise lawyers, contacts and diplomatic attention.

A feminist perspective adds another dimension. One of the executed citizens was a woman, but the public record available here is insufficient to establish her relationship to the other defendant, the precise allegations or any gender-specific circumstances of the proceedings. Inventing those details would reproduce the very injustice of prejudgment.

What we can say is that women migrants may face intersecting barriers involving economic dependence, stigma, language and restricted access to independent legal assistance. A credible consular protection system must anticipate such barriers rather than presume that formal rights are automatically accessible in practice.

Nor should the debate be reduced to whether the defendants were sympathetic. Rights are not rewards for innocence, respectability or public approval. The real test of due process is whether it protects people who are accused of conduct society condemns.

A state may investigate and punish offences within its jurisdiction, but punishment does not erase the accused person’s humanity. If we defend consular rights only when we approve of the person concerned, we have misunderstood what a right is.

There are practical reforms Bangladesh can pursue.

Its overseas missions need an early-warning system for nationals facing capital charges; access to independent local counsel and qualified interpreters; a properly funded legal-assistance mechanism; mandatory case monitoring and family communication; and a transparent escalation procedure when a death sentence becomes imminent. 

Bilateral discussions with Saudi Arabia should seek reliable protocols for consular notification and timely communication about capital cases. None of these steps requires Bangladesh to interfere unlawfully with another country’s courts.

Above all, Bangladesh must resist confusing diplomatic deference with national dignity.

Respect for another state’s sovereignty does not oblige silence about due process, nor does economic dependence cancel a government’s duty to advocate for its nationals. Equally, serious advocacy requires evidence, accurate legal claims and a willingness to scrutinise one’s own consular performance.

The most revealing response to these executions would not be a debate over the private morality of two people whose case files we have not seen. It would be a demand to know what they were charged with, what evidence was tested, what representation they received, whether their consular rights were respected and what Bangladesh did while intervention was still possible.

An execution closes a criminal case for the state that carries it out. It should not close the questions of justice, transparency and citizenship for the country whose nationals have died.

Dr Lubna Ferdowsi is an academic researcher and social commentator based in the UK. Her work draws on sociology, anthropology and feminist approaches to identity, culture, migration, power and everyday life.