October 14, 2025
DHAKA – The 23rd World Day Against the Death Penalty was observed globally on October 10. However, Bangladesh is at a crossroads as our government, despite having prominent human rights defenders in its ranks, including some who once campaigned to abolish the death penalty, now seeks to expand crimes punishable by death even as most of the world moves away from executions. More than 140 countries have abolished the death penalty in law or practice. In South Asia, Nepal and Bhutan abolished it decades ago, while Sri Lanka and the Maldives have refrained from executions for over 40 years. India retains the death penalty but reserves it for the “rarest of the rare.” A study on 1,486 death sentences issued by trial courts in India between 2000 and 2015 showed that only 4.9 percent remained on death row after appeal.
In Bangladesh, however, successive governments have widened the scope of capital offenses beyond international standards. Of the 33 death penalty offenses in the country, 23 were added after 1971, and 25 are for non-fatal crimes. Bangladesh’s intentional homicide rate is typically below the South Asian average, yet a large number of people remain on death row every year. Currently, 1,800 people are awaiting execution. In 2024, 2023 and 2022, Bangladesh imposed over 165, 248, and 169 death sentences, respectively. These statistics force us to reassess what the death penalty achieves and what justice requires.
The defence of capital punishment in Bangladesh often leans on nationalist rhetoric, portraying abolition as a foreign imposition. For example, our Supreme Court has observed that the death penalty is indispensable for Bangladesh, warning against “alien jurisprudence” because “our social conditions, social and cultural values are completely different from those of western countries… [and] we would not incorporate principles foreign to our Constitution.”
The irony is that the institutionalisation of the death penalty in Bangladesh is a colonial legacy. The Penal Code of 1860, drafted by British colonial administrators, was designed to discipline colonised subjects in the Indian subcontinent, not to reflect local norms. As Partha Chatterjee, an Indian political scientist and anthropologist, notes, new states reproduce colonial techniques of rule in the name of sovereignty, and Bangladesh is no exception. The stage has moved from the public gallows to concealed prison yards, but the underlying logic endures—to display state power, rather than to ensure justice through fairness.
Even if one accepts the argument that capital punishment suits “our” conditions, does the death penalty make us safer? States legitimise capital punishment by claiming it deters crimes, but no credible evidence supports this view. From a methodological perspective, there is no ethical way to design a rigorous study to test whether capital punishment deters crimes. A truly rigorous study would, for example, require randomly exposing people to the risk of execution, which is ethically indefensible. The US National Research Council’s review of three decades of deterrence research concluded that research “is not informative” on whether executions decrease, increase, or have no effect on homicide. In countries such as Bangladesh, with uneven crime data, claims of deterrence are even more speculative.
What reliably prevents violence is not Foucault’s “spectacle of the scaffold,” but the certainty and swiftness of sanctions delivered by competent institutions. Bangladesh’s experience with reducing acid violence bears this out. Acid attacks declined when the state restricted access to acid and enforced licensing through strict monitoring, and not by severe penalties alone.
Irreversible errors, fragile justice, and unequal burdens
Errors in regular sentences can be corrected; errors in a capital sentence are final. Research on wrongful convictions shows us how misidentification, unreliable forensics, and coerced confessions produce catastrophic errors that appeals miss. Bangladesh’s justice system contains the same risks: allegations of torture, limited forensic capacity, planted evidence, inadequate defence, thinly reasoned judgments, and arbitrary sentencing. Without sentencing guidelines, capital cases often proceed in an ad hoc manner, and identical facts can yield divergent outcomes.
These harms are compounded by time. As Albert Camus wrote in his Reflections on the Guillotine, “Two deaths are inflicted on him, the first being worse than the second, whereas he killed but once.” Capital appeals often stretch a decade, while prisoners endure the “death-row phenomenon”—prolonged confinement in harsh conditions, isolation, and constant anticipation of execution—a treatment deemed inhuman and degrading by international courts.
Nor are these burdens borne evenly. The French sociologist Loïc Wacquant describes criminal justice institutions as “selective in their blindness,” harshest towards those least able to defend themselves. Bangladesh’s death-row prisoners are overwhelmingly young, poor, with little schooling, and often with no prior criminal record. This skew is not accidental, but structural. Capital punishment is a form of necropolitics: it reproduces inequality by channelling the state’s lethal power toward the most marginalised in society.
In fact, the death penalty in Bangladesh is a political instrument that legislators repeatedly resort to in the wake of horrific crimes, in response to public anger. These punitive surges, exemplified by the mass death sentences that rights groups have criticised for failing to follow due process, do not strengthen the rule of law; they only signal courts swayed by populist pressure.
Claims of broad support for the death penalty in Bangladesh often rest on observations from these moments of outrage. However, evidence for public support for capital punishment beyond transient moments is scarce. There is a lack of reliable, nationally representative polling to show durable support for capital punishment. Where data does exist, it complicates the picture. Global values surveys have asked whether the death penalty is ever acceptable, and the data from 2017-2020 indicate an approval of around 15 percent in Bangladesh, far from a majority. Small, non-representative studies with students find some support for the death penalty, which drops when life imprisonment without parole is offered as an alternative. These studies also show that support for the death penalty often reflects frustration with a justice system perceived as corrupt and a desire for safety. Taken together,this is a mandate to repair everyday justice, not a licence to expand an irreversible penalty.
The way forward
More than a decade ago, Bangladesh’s higher judiciary marked a milestone in the Shukur Ali case by declaring the mandatory death penalty unconstitutional. The next step is abolition. Our justice system must honour victims and discipline the state. Capital punishment does neither. It brutalises the state by normalising violence and replacing institution-building with spectacle and performativity. And it fails victims, who deserve the truth, safety, and support—not a distant promise of execution after years of appeals.
Abolition is, thus, a project of state-building, a break with colonial logics of spectacular violence and fear as authority. When a state repeatedly resorts to the death penalty, it admits its failure to invest in the slow and painstaking labour of justice: truth-finding, reasoned judgment, due process, and punishment that respects rights, even for those undoubtedly guilty of the gravest of crimes. A democracy cannot be sustained on the deprivation of life.
The path to abolition is challenging, but the steps towards it can begin now through a phased approach. First a moratorium can be declared, temporarily pausing executions, independently reviewing all death-row cases, guaranteeing access to competent legal counsel and impartial adjudication, and publishing transparent death-row data. At the same time, investment can be made in a system that prevents harm: for example, prohibiting torture and coerced confessions, expanding survivor-centred services, and ending prolonged death-row confinement. Our constitution promises dignity and the rule of law; upholding that promise leaves no place for the death penalty in our justice system.
Esha Sraboni is a sociologist and research fellow at the Center on the Death Penalty Worldwide at Cornell University.
Views expressed in this article are the author’s own.