Admin 
By IILD Research Desk | February 2026
Bangladesh’s legal system is, in significant ways, a colonial inheritance. The Penal Code dates from 1860, drafted under a British administration with objectives that had little to do with the welfare of the people it governed. The Evidence Act, the Code of Criminal Procedure, and large portions of the civil law framework are similarly rooted in colonial legislative projects. Seventy-five years after independence, the question of how seriously Bangladesh has engaged with the decolonisation of its own legal architecture is one that deserves honest examination.
The answer is: partially, unevenly, and often superficially. Certain laws have been updated, amended, or replaced entirely. Constitutional provisions enshrine rights that the colonial framework never contemplated. The statutory landscape has been modified across multiple legislative sessions. But the fundamental assumptions embedded in the old framework — assumptions about the state’s relationship to the citizen, about the burden of proof in public-order offences, about the scope of executive discretion — have been more resistant to change.
Take the Penal Code’s sedition provisions as an illustration. Section 124A, borrowed almost verbatim from the Indian code and ultimately derived from the colonial administration’s anxiety about political dissent, has been used in Bangladesh to prosecute journalists, activists, and political opponents. That such a provision survives into the 2020s, in a country whose founding was an act of resistance against authoritarian power, is an irony that its critics have not been slow to note.
The colonial origins of Bangladesh’s legal framework matter not just as a matter of historical grievance but for practical reasons. Laws designed to govern a subject population under conditions of extraction and control are poorly adapted to govern a democratic society committed to rights, participation, and development. When colonial-era provisions are applied in contemporary contexts, they routinely produce results that are difficult to reconcile with constitutional commitments.
The digital security legal framework is another case in point. Bangladesh’s Digital Security Act, since revised, drew heavily on assumptions about information control that belong to a pre-democratic, pre-constitutional mindset. Its application against journalists and bloggers attracted sustained international criticism. While amendments have been made, critics argue that the underlying legislative philosophy has not fundamentally changed.
Land law presents a different but equally significant dimension of the colonial inheritance. Bangladesh’s land tenure system, with its complex layering of customary practice, colonial codification, and post-independence modification, remains deeply opaque and inaccessible to ordinary citizens. Land disputes are among the most common sources of litigation, and the courts that adjudicate them are chronically backlogged. The costs — financial, temporal, and psychological — fall disproportionately on the poor.
The legal status of indigenous communities in the Chittagong Hill Tracts represents perhaps the most acute instance of unresolved colonial-era injustice. The 1997 Peace Accord, which ended a decades-long insurgency, included commitments to autonomy and land rights that remain only partially implemented. The legal framework governing the CHT continues to reflect tensions between the postcolonial state’s integrationist impulses and the indigenous communities’ legitimate claims to self-governance.
Reform of the colonial legal inheritance requires more than legislative amendment. It requires a reconceptualisation of the relationship between state power and individual rights — a reconceptualisation that takes seriously both Bangladesh’s constitutional commitments and its aspirations for a just and inclusive society. Law schools have a role to play in this, as do the bar associations, the judiciary, and civil society organisations that track rights issues.
The positive developments should be acknowledged. The constitutional amendments that strengthened fundamental rights, the legislative creation of the National Human Rights Commission, and the progressive elements of the 2011 constitutional revision all represent genuine steps. Bangladesh has also been an active participant in international human rights mechanisms, submitting UPR reports and engaging — if sometimes defensively — with treaty body reviews.
What is needed now is a more systematic approach: a comprehensive review of the statute book for provisions that are incompatible with contemporary rights standards, a legislative programme for their reform, and — crucially — the building of institutional capacity within the legal system to enforce rights in practice and not just on paper. Decolonisation of the law is not a symbolic project; it is a practical one, with real consequences for real people.
