Lawyers condemn Labour MP trial
A group of the UK’s high-profile lawyers and legal experts have warned against the consequences of an “unfair and contrived” trial that Labour Party member of Parliament Tulip Siddiq has been subjected to in Bangladesh. Siddiq, a niece of Bangladesh’s deposed PM Sheikh Hasina, had resigned as a Treasury minister in British PM Keir Starmer’s Cabinet earlier this year. A trial against her began in Dhaka in August, with a verdict of Bangladesh’s Anti-Corruption Commission expected later this week. In a letter addressed to Bangladeshi High Commissioner to the UK Abida Islam, lawyers including Cherie the wife of former UK prime minister Tony Blair and former ministers Robert Buckland and Dominic Grieve, have expressed concerns that Siddiq has not been granted basic rights during the Dhaka trial process.
“Such a process is artificial and a contrived and unfair way of pursuing a prosecution,” reads the letter, revealed by ‘The Guardian’ newspaper on Tuesday. The letter comes days after Hasina was sentenced to death in absentia by a special tribunal in Bangladesh.
“As she (Siddiq) lives in the UK and is a UK national, she is plainly not a fugitive. She is an elected member of parliament, who can be contacted at the House of Commons, and indeed extradited to Bangladesh to face charges if there are proper grounds for seeking her extradition.
“Not only has Ms Siddiq not been presented with the charges and evidence against her, she has also not been able to obtain legal representation. A lawyer in Bangladesh she appointed to represent her was forced to stand down, reporting that he had been placed under house arrest, further informing Ms Siddiq that his daughter had been threatened,” the letter goes on.
The experts say that reports from Bangladesh indicate a “pattern of interference and intimidation in the legal system since the interim Government took office.” The ACC under Bangladesh’s Interim Government leader, Chief Adviser Muhammad Yunus, has claimed the London-based Labour MP received a 7,200 square feet plot in the diplomatic zone through “abuse of power and influence.”
The 43-year-old politician has consistently denied all the allegations against her, claiming the prosecution is politically motivated. In her resignation letter to Starmer back in January, she pointed out that his Independent Adviser on Ministers’ Interests had not found her in breach of the UK’s Ministerial Code and asserted that she had not “acted improperly.”
The lawyers’ letter this week highlights that it is difficult to see how widespread media engagement in Bangladesh accusing Siddiq of criminal wrongdoing can be “consistent with a fair and impartial trial free from interference.”
“Given all of the circumstances, we have serious concerns that the trial of Ms Siddiq in absentia is unfair, that she does not have a proper opportunity of defending herself, or indeed any opportunity at all, that she is being tried in her absence without justification and that the proceedings fall far short of standards of fairness recognised internationally,” they point out.
The Bangladeshi High Commission in London is yet to react to the letter or the UK media reports. Siddiq, meanwhile, took to social media to express her gratitude to the cross-party group of legal experts for “calling out the fundamental flaws in the criminal justice system in Bangladesh – a system that now seems set to convict me.”
Hasina was on November 17 sentenced to death in absentia by a special tribunal for “crimes against humanity” over her Government’s brutal crackdown on student-led protests last year. In its verdict that followed a months-long trial, the country’s International Crimes Tribunal (ICT-BD) described the 78-year-old Awami League leader as the “mastermind and principal architect” of the violent repression that killed hundreds of protesters.
