UNDERSTANDING POSTCOLONIAL PENAL REFORM IN BANGLADESH SPECIAL LEGAL REGIME IN CONTEXT

This research involves a socio-legal analysis of postcolonial special penal reform in Bangladesh. In spite of robust presence of constitutional commitment to the rule of law ideals, the shadow of colonial hangover continues to haunt the justice institutions in this post-colonial state. In addition to its colonial legacies, some postcolonial statutes offer harsh sentences and stringent procedures in investigation, trial and punishment of many vaguely defined new forms of crime. In practice, such sporadic postcolonial reforms have turned out to be either inappropriate or inadequate because the persons at helm of the state have the tendency to arbitrarily manipulate the course of law to buttress their power with an eye on controlling their adversaries.

In order to fathom the dynamics of an offshoot of criminal justice system, this thesis is premised upon some philosophical and practical debates surrounding some highly invoked expressions including rule of law, criminalisation, and postcolonial legal politics.

The key query investigated in this research is how and why a particular postcolonial penal trend is systematically problematic. The data sources used to answer this question include interviews with 15 key informants and court observations supplemented by an auto-ethnography.

The thesis argues that an eclectic complex of law, justice and society has emerged in a volatile state that tends to move between the high ideals of the rule of law and oxymoronic rule by law. It finds that the special legal regime per se is not at adds with the rule of law; rather, empirically it forms a host of problematic menifestations of erosion of rule of law as special laws leave wider scope for abuse. It also presents a sui generis case of methodological barriers undertaken in socio-legal contexts that posed formidable challenges to a researcher.