The Dhaka Cyber Tribunal on Thursday jailed internationally acclaimed human rights defender Adilur Rahman Khan and his colleague ASM Nasiruddin Elan for two years for a fact finding report on May 5–6, 2013 violence during Hefazat-e-Islam demonstrations and overnight operations.

In a packed courtroom, judge AM Julfikar Hayat also fined them Tk 10,000 each in the case filed with the Gulshan police station in 2013 under Section 57(2) of the Information and Communication Technology Act 2006.

The tribunal also ordered deduction of the period of detention of the two rights activists in the case from the jail term.Franco-German Prize for Human Rights and the Rule of Law winner Adilur is the secretary of rights organisation Odhikar and Nasiruddin is its director.

Emerging from the court, Adilur said, ‘We have struggled for defending human rights. We are denied justice. We will appeal against the conviction.’ Adilur, also former deputy attorney general, won numerous international rights awards including the Franco-German Prize for Human Rights and the Rule of Law after his organisation has documented growing numbers of extrajudicial killings and enforced disappearance. 

Defence counsel Mohammad Ruhul Amin Bhuiyan rejected the conviction and said that there was no documentary evidence to prove the charge.

‘The prosecution repeatedly alleged that Odhikar published a list of 61 people claiming that they were killed during the May 2013 violence. Where is the list? They found a list in a laptop and in which 25 were marked as “yet to be confirmed”. Was it published anywhere and if so, how it was published,’ he argued.

He insisted that the forensic report did not mention any such list was shared by Odhikar through any electronic medium.The tribunal’s public prosecutor Mohammad Nazrul Islam Shamim said, ‘I am happy with the conviction. But I could be happier if they were jailed for eight years or more.’

The United States expressed concerns over the judgement while the European Parliament adopted a resolution on the human rights situations in Bangladesh deploring the sentence of Adilur and Nasiruddin and urging the Bangladesh government ‘to immediately and unconditionally quash the ruling’.

Seventy-two human rights organisations across the world in a joint statement called on Bangladesh authorities to immediately release the human rights defenders, quash their convictions, and end all reprisals against them for their legitimate human rights work.

In the packed courtroom, foreign diplomats from the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and Switzerland, a representative from the United Nations, and Bangladeshi politicians, rights activists and academics, among others, were present during the pronouncement of verdict against the two noted rights activists, who were in the dock. 

Before reading out the judgement he would read out crucial portion of the 50-page verdict. In the verdict, he stated that the trial was delayed as the High Court had stayed the trial twice.

The police filed the case against the two on charge of publishing a fact-finding report on Odhikar’s website about the number of deaths during the joint force operation against Hefazat-e-Islam activists at Shapla Chattar in Dhaka in May 5–6, 2013.

Odhikar in a statement on Thursday said that the two were charged for releasing a report on extrajudicial killings committed in May 5–6, 2013 centring the Hefazat-e-Islam protests.

‘This is the first time in Bangladesh’s 52-year history that human rights defenders have been jailed for reporting human rights violations,’ the Odhikar statement read.

It said that on August 10, 2013, Adilur was picked up by members of the Detective Branch of the Dhaka Metropolitan Police, was kept disappeared overnight and was produced in court in the afternoon of the next day. Nasiruddin subsequently surrendered to the court.

Later, Adilur and Elan were charged under the ICT Act and both were released on bail after 62 and 25 days of detention in jail respectively.

‘As an organisation Odhikar has drawn  the sustained wrath of the establishment for becoming the voice of the victims of human rights violations, including enforced disappearances, extrajudicial killings, torture, arbitrary detention and against the suppression of freedom of expression and assembly, and for its engagement with the United Nations Human Rights Mechanisms,’ said the statement.

On April 5, 2023, the tribunal closed the examination of witnesses to proceed for examining the accused. After three dates of hearing, the prosecutor appealed for a further investigation.

On May 15, the tribunal judge rejected the defence objection and ordered a further investigation into the case.The tribunal was scheduled to deliver the verdict on September 7 but deferred the verdict until Thursday.

The tribunal in the verdict said that the government stated only 11 people were killed in two days of violence in 2013. The government yet to complete the cases linked to the killing and violence took place in 2013 while Hefazat-e-Islam was yet to publish any formal list of deaths.