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LequteMan
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According to The Telegraph Bangladesh's Supreme Court has sentenced a senior leader of Bangladesh's main Islamic party, Abdul Quader Mollah to death for war crimes committed during Bangladesh's 1971 war of independence from Pakistan where up to three million people were estimated to have been killed.
Mr Mollah, known by opponents as the 'Butcher of Mirpur', is one of four Jamaat-e-Islami leaders sentenced to death by the Bangladesh government's controversial International Crimes Tribunal which was established in 2010 by prime minister Sheikh Hasina to try those accused of war crimes during the 1971 war of independence from Pakistan.
The Jamaat leader was jailed for life earlier this year for rape, murder and torture. The government later amended the law to allow it to appeal against the verdict and sentence.
The Attorney General Mahbubey Alam Mr Mollah said Mr Mollah now had no further right of appeal and could only plead for clemency.
The ruling was followed by violent protests in Chittagong and Dhaka and a call for a 48-hour general strike by leaders of his Jamaat-e-Islami party. Human rights groups and his defence team said the decision was a breach of natural justice.
Toby Cadman, Mr Mollah's British lawyer, said while he believed atrocities had been committed in Bangladesh, the trials of his client and others accused of war crimes had been politically motivated.
Mr Cadman cited a secretly filmed meeting between a defence figure and a key witness in the war crimes trial of another Jamaat leader in which the witness said he was being forced by government threats and financial inducements to give evidence.
A Human Rights Watch spokesman said retrospective use of a new law against Mr Mollah was a breach of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
"The prohibition on retroactive penalties is one of the fundamental protections of the rights of the accused in both international law, and for that matter in Bangladeshi law as well. Without this protection, governments would simply keep amending laws whenever faced with a verdict they didn't like," he said.
