Sheikh Hasina will not hang tomorrow. She fled Bangladesh in August 2024, and she remains abroad. But the International Crimes Tribunal-I in Dhaka has now formally sentenced her to death anyway. The former prime minister, tried in absentia alongside former Home Minister Asaduzzaman Khan Kamal, received the maximum penalty on November 17, 2025, for the suppression of protests that killed hundreds of civilians in July and August of the previous year.
The stakes here are not abstract. This is a trial of the person who ran the country. The charges, filed in June 2025 by prosecutor Mohammad Tajul Islam, cover a two-month period when the government ordered security forces to fire on demonstrators. International observers and human rights groups called it one of the deadliest civilian crackdowns in Bangladesh since independence. The verdict makes official what those groups already said: the state killed its own people, and the people at the top are responsible.
But the tribunal’s judgment did not treat everyone the same. Chowdhury Abdullah Al-Mamun, the former Inspector General of Police, got five years. He has been in custody since September 2024. He cooperated. He testified against his former bosses. That cooperation bought him a prison sentence, not the gallows. The three-judge panel weighed the evidence and decided that a state witness who helps the court deserves leniency. Hasina and Kamal, who never appeared, got death.
This case, formally styled as The Chief Prosecutor vs. Sheikh Hasina & Others, carries immediate weight for Bangladesh’s political future. Hasina’s party, the Awami League, still exists. Its leaders are either in hiding or in jail. The verdict removes any ambiguity about the legal status of the former government’s actions. The tribunal has declared the crackdown a crime. That is a precedent. Future governments will know that ordering mass violence against protesters can result in a death sentence, even if the accused is not in the room.
The United States watched this closely. The State Department had expressed concern during the 2024 protests and called for restraint. Bangladesh is a longstanding ally. The U.S. president at the time did not intervene to stop the trial. The verdict now puts Washington in a difficult position: condemn the death sentence for a former ally, or accept the tribunal’s finding that the crackdown was murder. Silence is a choice too.
The 2024 protests themselves were a rupture. Tens of thousands of people took to the streets. The government sent police and paramilitary forces. The death toll climbed. International condemnation followed. But condemnation is not justice. This verdict is the first concrete legal reckoning for those deaths. It is not a political statement from a foreign capital. It is a court ruling, enforceable under Bangladeshi law, against the woman who once held all the power.
Sheikh Hasina is unlikely to ever serve this sentence. She is not in Bangladesh. Extradition is uncertain. But the sentence matters anyway. It tells the victims’ families that the state now admits what happened. It tells the police and military that orders to kill civilians may one day be judged. And it tells the next prime minister, whoever that is, that the tribunal’s reach extends to the top.
