Bangladesh’s Supreme Court restores Jamaat-e-Islami's party registration

Dhaka: Bangladesh’s Supreme Court on Sunday ordered the Election Commission to restore the rightwing Jamaat-e-Islami's party registration, nearly eight months after the interim government lifted a ban on it, clearing the way for its participation in future elections.

Court officials said the SC’s Appellate Division, led by Chief Justice Syed Refaat Ahmed, directed the commission to restore the party’s registration.

The apex court, at the same time, said it was up to the Election Commission (EC) to decide if Jamaat could contest polls using its traditional “scale” symbol.

The EC scrapped the registration of Jamaat, which was opposed to Bangladesh’s 1971 independence from Pakistan, in December 2018 in line with a High Court ruling.

In 2013, the Bangladesh Supreme Court cancelled the registration of the Jamaat-e-Islami, ruling that the party is unfit to contest national elections.

Former prime minister Sheikh Hasina’s government slapped a total ban on the party days ahead of her ouster on August 5, 2024 in a violent mass movement led by a platform called Students against Discrimination (SAD).

Jaamaat and several other parties had backed SAD.

After Sheikh Hasina's ouster, the party appealed for a review of the 2013 court order banning it.

"Today concludes the decade-long legal battle. We hope Bangladesh will have a vibrant parliament after this verdict. We hope voters will vote for the Jamaat candidate of their choice now," one of Jamaat’s leading counsels Mohammad Shishir Manir said.

The verdict boosted Jamaat further as it came a week after one of its top leaders of the party and a death row convict, ATM Azharul Islam, was freed by the same apex court. Islam had been facing charges of committing crimes against humanity by siding with the Pakistani troops during the Liberation War.

The interim government’s law adviser Asif Nazrul had immediately welcomed Islam’s acquittal and said, “The credit for creating the scope for establishing this justice goes to the July-August (2024) mass movement leadership”.

The interim government led by Chief Advisor Muhammad Yunus recently disbanded Hasina's Awami League.

In the absence of the Awami League, its arch-rival Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), led by former prime minister Khaleda Zia, has emerged as the main actor in the country's political arena, although it has distanced itself from its long-time ally, Jamaat.

Bangladesh under Hasina’s premiership in 2009 initiated a legal process to try collaborators of Pakistani forces during the Liberation War on charges of crimes against humanity and genocide in the country's International Crimes Tribunal (ICT-BD) Following trials, six top Jamaat-e-Islami leaders and one senior BNP figure were executed after the Supreme Court’s Appellate Division upheld their convictions and sentences handed down by the tribunal.

The tribunal is now set to try senior Awami League leaders and government officials, including policemen who served under Hasina's government, on identical charges for its crackdown on last year’s violent anti-government protests.

According to a UN rights office report, some 1,400 people were killed between July 15 and August 15 last year as violence continued even after the fall of the past regime.