Media Trial in Bangladesh: Balancing Freedom of the Press and the Right to a Fair Trial

Introduction

In 2021, a young man in Dhaka was publicly named and pictured across television and online news as the man who had murdered his own mother and stored her body in a refrigerator. The coverage was vivid and confident. It was also wrong.¹ Later investigation pointed instead to neighbours as the likely perpetrators, by which point the son’s reputation had already been destroyed in the court of public opinion, long before any court of law had reached a verdict. Episodes of this kind are not unusual in Bangladesh, where television panels and social media threads routinely pronounce on guilt while a case is still under investigation.

Both freedom of the press and the right to a fair trial are guaranteed under the Constitution, yet the two rights sit in an uneasy relationship.² Article 39 protects freedom of speech and of the press, though only subject to reasonable restrictions, while Article 35(3) guarantees an accused person a prompt and public trial by an independent and impartial court, a guarantee the courts have read as encompassing the presumption of innocence.³ On paper, the fair trial right looks closer to absolute than the qualified right to publish. In practice, the balance tips the other way: media coverage of pending cases proceeds largely unchecked, while the mechanisms meant to restrain it—contempt of court, the Press Council, professional ethics codes—are either unsettled in their legal status or too weak to bite.

This article argues that Bangladesh’s problem is not an absence of relevant law but a failure to operationalise it: existing safeguards against prejudicial reporting are fragmented, inconsistently enforced, and increasingly unsuited to a media environment where a story can shape public opinion within hours of an arrest. The discussion first maps the legal framework governing press freedom and fair trial rights, then examines how that framework has played out in a series of high-profile cases, before turning to a critical assessment of where the system falls short.

Legal Framework

Constitutional Guarantees

The starting point is the Constitution itself, which protects both rights at stake without resolving the tension between them. Article 39(2)(b) guarantees freedom of the press, but makes that freedom expressly subject to reasonable restrictions imposed by law in the interests of state security, friendly relations with foreign states, public order, decency or morality, or in relation to contempt of court, defamation, or incitement to an offence.⁴ Article 35(3), by contrast, entitles a person accused of a criminal offence to a prompt and public trial by an independent and impartial court, and this guarantee has been understood to embed the presumption of innocence as a foundational feature of Bangladeshi criminal justice.⁵

The asymmetry is worth sitting with for a moment: press freedom is conditional by the Constitution’s own text, while the fair trial guarantee is not qualified in the same way. If the constitutional hierarchy were applied consistently, prejudicial reporting on pending cases ought to yield fairly readily to the accused’s right to an untainted trial. Whether the law actually functions that way is a separate question, addressed below.

Contempt of Court

The main statutory tool for restraining prejudicial publication is the law of contempt, and its recent history in Bangladesh has been unusually unsettled. Commenting publicly on a matter that is sub judice—under active judicial consideration—has long been treated as contempt, since such comment risks prejudging or influencing the eventual judgment.⁶ The colonial-era Contempt of Courts Act 1926 governed this area for decades until it was replaced by the Contempt of Courts Act 2013, which attempted to modernise the law and introduced, among other things, a defence of fair and accurate reporting of judicial proceedings.⁷

That replacement did not last. The High Court Division later struck down the 2013 Act as discriminatory, holding that it effectively shielded government officials and journalists from contempt liability while leaving ordinary citizens exposed, in violation of the equal protection guarantee in Article 27; the effect of the ruling was to revive the 1926 Act.⁸ The practical consequence is a degree of legal uncertainty about precisely what protections against prejudicial publication currently apply, at a moment when the volume and speed of online reporting make those protections more necessary than they were in 1926.

Press Regulation and Special Protections

Outside the contempt jurisdiction, the Press Council Act 1974 allows a complainant to bring an ethics violation before the Bangladesh Press Council, which may investigate and, under section 12, issue a warning to the offending journalist or publication.⁹ This is, frankly, a modest remedy: a warning carries no compensatory or punitive weight, and it does nothing to undo reputational harm already done by the time a complaint is resolved.

A narrower but more concrete protection exists for children: section 28 of the Children Act 2013 prohibits publishing any particulars of a case involving a child that would lead, directly or indirectly, to that child’s identification.¹⁰ That provision at least has teeth in principle, though enforcement against digital and social media publication remains inconsistent.

Case Law and Incident Analysis

The Appellate Division’s judgment in Bangladesh v Rabbani and Others remains the clearest judicial statement of the underlying principle: comment on a matter that is sub judice amounts to contempt precisely because it is liable to prejudge or influence the eventual judgment.¹¹ That principle is easy to state and hard to enforce, as several recent controversies illustrate.

A frequently cited example is the 2020 case of a rape allegation made by a Dhaka University student, in which a man identified in media reports as “Majnu” was presented, almost immediately after arrest, as the confirmed perpetrator. When a subsequent investigation cast doubt on the accuracy of the initial reporting, public opinion had already hardened into two opposing camps—one demanding the harshest possible punishment, the other insisting on his innocence—and the resulting unrest reportedly disrupted the proceedings themselves.¹² The refrigerator case mentioned in the introduction follows the same script: swift, confident reporting naming a suspect, followed by a quieter and less publicised correction once the facts turned out to be more complicated.¹³

Not every instance of intense coverage is straightforwardly harmful, and this is where the analysis has to get more careful. The murders of Abrar Fahad, a student of the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET), and of Nusrat Jahan Rafi in Feni both drew sustained, aggressive media attention, and in both cases that attention arguably helped keep pressure on investigators and prosecutors in matters that might otherwise have stalled.¹⁴ The difficulty is separating legitimate media activism—coverage that holds institutions accountable—from media trial proper, where reporting moves from scrutiny of the process to a verdict on the individual before any court has spoken. Commentators on this issue tend to agree that the line exists in principle but struggle to say exactly where it falls in a given case, which is itself telling: if experienced legal writers cannot draw the boundary with confidence, newsroom editors working against a deadline are unlikely to draw it more carefully.¹⁵

Critical Assessment

Three structural weaknesses stand out, and they reinforce each other rather than operating in isolation.

The first is legal uncertainty at the very core of the framework. With the 2013 contempt statute struck down and the 1926 Act revived by judicial order rather than fresh legislative drafting, journalists, editors, and litigants alike are left applying a colonial-era text to a media landscape it never anticipated—live blogs, verified social media accounts, anonymous tip lines feeding straight into prime-time bulletins.¹⁶ A framework built for print newspapers with weekly or daily cycles is being asked to do work it was not designed for.

The second is enforcement asymmetry. Courts have, on occasion, intervened forcefully where public sentiment is already engaged and the case is highly visible, yet there is little evidence of comparable intervention in the far larger number of ordinary criminal matters where a suspect is named, photographed, and effectively convicted in the press well before trial. The Press Council’s warning-only power under section 12 does not change this calculus; it costs a publication almost nothing to accept a warning after the reputational damage has already been done.¹⁷ As a result, the accused’s protection against prejudicial coverage depends less on the strength of the applicable law than on whether the case happens to attract the sort of scrutiny that makes intervention politically or institutionally convenient.

The third weakness is definitional. Neither the Constitution nor the contempt statute offers a working definition of what separates permissible media activism from an impermissible media trial, and without one, both journalists and courts are left to feel their way case by case.¹⁸ A test drawn from comparative jurisprudence—for instance, asking whether a publication creates a substantial risk of serious prejudice to a specific, identifiable proceeding, rather than a generalised risk to the administration of justice—might offer more predictability than the current ad hoc approach. Transplanting such a test, however, would require Bangladeshi courts to develop it through a sustained line of cases, which has not yet happened.

Conclusion

Bangladesh does not lack constitutional or statutory tools for managing the tension between a free press and a fair trial; it lacks a coherent, contemporary framework for applying them. The revival of the 1926 Contempt of Courts Act, following the collapse of its 2013 successor, has left the law in a state that few would describe as settled, while the Press Council’s remedial powers remain too weak to alter newsroom incentives.

What is needed is not a blunter restriction on press freedom—Bangladesh’s journalists already operate under the reasonable-restrictions test in Article 39(2)(b)—but a sharper and more consistently applied one: statutory guidance on reporting suspects before charge, a genuinely enforceable sub judice standard, and a Press Council with the power to do more than write a letter of caution. Until then, whether an accused person receives the presumption of innocence the Constitution promises will keep depending less on the strength of the law and more on whether their case was, unfortunately, interesting enough to make the evening news.

Footnote(S):

¹ New Age, ‘Legality of Media Trials in Bangladesh’ (New Age, 25 November 2024).

² Constitution of the People’s Republic of Bangladesh 1972, arts 35(3), 39.

³ ibid art 35(3); Jus Corpus, ‘Shortcomings of Media Trial in Bangladesh’ (24 January 2022).

⁴ Constitution of the People’s Republic of Bangladesh 1972, art 39(2)(b).

⁵ ibid art 35(3).

⁶ Bangladesh v Rabbani and Others (2000) 52 DLR (AD) 81, discussed in Dhaka University Law Journal, vol 35(1) (2024).

⁷ Contempt of Courts Act 2013 (Bangladesh) (since struck down); see The Daily Star, ‘An Overview of the New Contempt of Court Act’ (The Daily Star, 19 April 2013).

⁸ The Daily Star, ‘2013 Contempt of Court Law Discriminatory’ (The Daily Star), reporting the High Court Division’s judgment restoring the Contempt of Courts Act 1926.

⁹ Press Council Act 1974, s 12; New Age (n 1).

¹⁰ Children Act 2013, s 28; The Daily Star, ‘Media Trial: Prejudicing the Rights of the Parties in Criminal Cases’ (The Daily Star, 6 July 2021).

¹¹ Bangladesh v Rabbani and Others (2000) 52 DLR (AD) 81 (n 6).

¹² NILS Bangladesh, ‘Media Trial and its Effect over Judicial Proceedings’ (18 August 2021).

¹³ New Age (n 1).

¹⁴ New Age (n 1); The Business Standard, ‘Is Media Trial Culture in Bangladesh a Hindrance to the Justice System?’ (20 February 2021).

¹⁵ Jus Corpus (n 3); Counsels Law Partners, ‘Contempt of Court in Bangladesh’ (CLP).

¹⁶ The Daily Star (n 8); Journalism University, ‘Avoiding Pitfalls: Key Precautions in Legal Reporting’ (2026).

¹⁷ Press Council Act 1974, s 12 (n 9).

¹⁸ The Business Standard (n 14).

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Legislation

• Constitution of the People’s Republic of Bangladesh 1972
• Contempt of Courts Act 1926
• Contempt of Courts Act 2013 (struck down 2022)
• Press Council Act 1974
• Children Act 2013

Cases

• Bangladesh v Rabbani and Others (2000) 52 DLR (AD) 81

Secondary Sources

• Counsels Law Partners, ‘Contempt of Court in Bangladesh’ (CLP)
• Journalism University, ‘Avoiding Pitfalls: Key Precautions in Legal Reporting’ (2026)
• Jus Corpus, ‘Shortcomings of Media Trial in Bangladesh’ (24 January 2022)
• New Age, ‘Legality of Media Trials in Bangladesh’ (New Age, 25 November 2024)
• New Age, ‘The Conundrum of Free Media vs Fair Trial’ (New Age, 17 January 2021)
• NILS Bangladesh, ‘Media Trial and its Effect over Judicial Proceedings’ (18 August 2021)
• The Business Standard, ‘Is Media Trial Culture in Bangladesh a Hindrance to the Justice System?’ (20 February 2021)
• The Daily Star, ‘2013 Contempt of Court Law Discriminatory’ (The Daily Star)
• The Daily Star, ‘An Overview of the New Contempt of Court Act’ (The Daily Star, 19 April 2013)
• The Daily Star, ‘Media Trial: Prejudicing the Rights of the Parties in Criminal Cases’ (The Daily Star, 6 July 2021)