Bangladesh just closed off every legal path for its exiled former leader
2 days ago · 10 November 2026Share
Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina paid her respects by placing flowers at the portrait of Bangabandhu at the Bangladesh Embassy in Rome on February 5, 2020. File photo. Press Information Department · Public domain
Sheikh Hasina says she's going back to Bangladesh next month.
And Bangladesh's chief prosecutor says that ends one way. Execution.
Md Aminul Islam is the Chief Prosecutor of Bangladesh's International Crimes Tribunal. He said earlier today that she has no way out. If she comes back, the death sentence against her gets carried out.
He's talking about her death sentence. The tribunal handed it down a year ago, in November 2025, for crimes against humanity.
And that sentence is now final.
Here's why. The law gave her 30 days to appeal. Md Aminul Islam confirmed earlier today that the deadline has passed. No appeal was filed. So under Bangladeshi law, the death sentence stands. No legal route left to challenge it.
So who is Sheikh Hasina? She ran Bangladesh for 15 years. Then a mass uprising forced her out in 2024. The United Nations says up to 1,400 people were killed in the crackdown on protesters before she fell. She fled to India by helicopter as crowds stormed her palace.
The tribunal convicted her in absentia last year. Three counts. Incitement, ordering killings, and failing to prevent the killings. She wasn't in the country to pick her own lawyer, so the state picked one for her. She's called the trial a jurisprudential joke.
She isn't backing down either. Sheikh Hasina told AFP this week that she's fully aware she faces being hanged if she returns. She says quote "fear cannot decide my duty to the people".
But here's the part that complicates her plan. Bangladesh's government won't let her travel home on her own terms.
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Contains modified Capella Space synthetic aperture radar data of Dhaka, Bangladesh.Capella Space · CC BY 4.0
Her lawyers asked the Bangladesh High Commission in New Delhi this week to renew her passport and national ID. Md Aminul Islam said the passport authority may refuse to issue a passport to anyone found guilty of serious crimes. He also said Bangladesh's 1973 Passport Order legally bars giving travel documents to a person sentenced to death who has absconded.
So Bangladesh's government rejected her passport request outright. It says it wants her back only through the extradition treaty it already has with India. Humaiun Kobir, Bangladesh's State Minister for Foreign Affairs, said Dhaka will pursue, in his words, the terrorist Hasina through that extradition arrangement.
Bangladesh's foreign ministry has formally asked India to extradite her. India says the request is under legal review. No timeline. No decision.
So right now, Sheikh Hasina has a death sentence, no passport, and no country willing to hand her over.
And here's the twist. Md Aminul Islam's own words this week point two different ways. In the same breath as warning she'll be executed, he also told the Bangladeshi outlet Prothom Alo, a day earlier, that her passport bid was a political stunt. He said flatly that she will not return.
One retired American diplomat went further. Jon F Danilowicz was deputy chief of mission at the US embassy in Dhaka. He told Al Jazeera there's zero chance she returns in December and called her pledge a bluff.
Md Aminul Islam has also said before that Bangladesh's government keeps what he called the absolute inherent power to suspend or cancel any punishment. So even a final death sentence might not be the end of the story.
And tension around her banned party is already on Dhaka's streets. Police arrested 12 people this month, said to be members of her outlawed Awami League party. Petrol bomb attacks hit an empty bus, other property and police vehicles. Nobody was hurt.
So what happens next? Three things nobody can answer yet. Whether Sheikh Hasina actually tries to travel without valid papers. Whether India moves on the extradition request before she does. And whether Bangladesh's government would use its own stated power to change the sentence, if she ever actually ended up in its custody.
Right now, the one deadline that could have saved her has already passed.
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