One Year On: The Trial I Don't Believe Was Ever Going to Be Fair

It's been a year now, and I've watched the tribunal proceedings against Sheikh Hasina unfold from a distance, the way I imagine a lot of AL supporters have, with a mix of anger and a resigned sense that the outcome was decided before the first hearing even started.

I'm not going to claim I have full knowledge of every event from those chaotic weeks in July and August. I don't. But I do know that a legal process run by an interim government that came to power specifically because the previous one fell, prosecuting the leader of that previous government in absentia, is not the kind of neutral justice its supporters like to describe it as. It reads, to me and to a lot of people I know, like a political outcome dressed up in legal language.

I think real accountability, if it's needed, requires a process that doesn't already have its verdict baked into who's running it. I don't expect people who wanted this government gone to see it that way, and I'm not going to spend this post trying to convince them. I just want it on record, from someone who lived through this as a supporter, that plenty of us never believed this was really about justice in the first place.