Law as Moral Architecture in Times of Political Rupture This intervention does not proceed from the standpoint of legal practice or doctrinal arbitration. It approaches law as a normative and political instrument, one that distributes moral recognition, assigns legitimacy, and shapes collective memory. The concern here is not whether indemnity can be technically enacted, but what kind of moral order it constructs when enacted. This piece is prompted by a public statement issued by the Law Adviser to Bangladesh’s Interim Government, Asif Nazrul, in which he announced the preparation of an indemnity ordinance granting immunity to those described as “July fighters.” In the statement, disseminated through his official Facebook account and subsequently reproduced across national media, the proposed indemnity is justified on constitutional grounds, specifically Article 46, and framed as a legitimate instrument of transitional justice, with references to the 1971 Liberation War and post–Arab Spring precedents. [1,2,3,4] Taken together, these claims do not merely describe an impending legal measure;
they advance a normative reclassification of political violence itself. It is this reclassification, its assumptions, implications, and dangers, that the present critique seeks to interrogate. The proposal to grant indemnity to so-called [5] “July fighters” is being advanced as a measure of transitional justice, grounded in constitutional authority and comparative precedent. Yet upon closer examination, the proposal rests on a series of category errors, legal, historical, and moral, which together amount to a dangerous transformation of law into a mechanism of political absolution. This critique argues that the proposed indemnity framework does not merely risk injustice in individual cases; it reconfigures accountability itself, producing a hierarchy of legal subjects and institutionalising impunity under the guise of transition. References are used here not as appeals to authority, but as illustrations of recurring patterns in how societies attempt, and often fail, to reconcile power with justice. From Exception to Erasure: How Immunity Becomes Impunity Immunity in law is not a moral reward;…
