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; it is an exception carved out of accountability for limited functional reasons. Traditionally, immunity operates in one of three forms:
1. Functional immunity (acts performed in official capacity)
2. Procedural immunity (restrictions on forum or timing, not liability itself)
3. Conditional or qualified immunity, revocable upon grave breach
What is being proposed here, however, is none of these. It is substantive, identity-based, and pre-emptive immunity, granted not after inquiry, but before investigation. It is not based on conduct, but on political classification.
This distinction is decisive. International and comparative jurisprudence consistently rejects blanket or self-amnesty laws that extinguish criminal liability for serious offences without individualised assessment.[6] Courts across jurisdictions have held that where immunity forecloses investigation into grave violations, particularly killing, torture, or collective violence, it ceases to be immunity and becomes impunity.[7]
The proposed indemnity law thus does not suspend justice temporarily; it effectively abolishes it selectively.
When Constitutional Power Devours Constitutional Meaning
Article 46 of the Bangladesh Constitution empowers Parliament to enact indemnity laws. This authority, however, is neither self-validating nor unlimited. Constitutional powers must be read harmoniously, not hierarchically – not merely as a matter of constitutional technique, but because constitutions are moral documents that encode whose lives are grievable and whose deaths are juridically forgettable.
Even on its own textual terms, Article 46 is far narrower than the use now being proposed. The provision authorises Parliament, by law, to indemnify specific acts done in good faith for the purpose of maintaining or restoring law and order; it does not empower the executive to confer immunity through ordinance or executive fiat, nor does it contemplate the judicial validation of such immunity absent legislative enactment. More importantly, the logic of Article 46 presupposes regulatory excess in the course of public order enforcement, not grave crimes such as murder, lynching, or organised political violence, acts that cannot be reclassified as collateral to “law and order” without emptying the constitutional distinction between restraint and criminality of all meaning.
The expansive reading of Article 46 collides directly with Article 26(1) and (2) of the Constitution, which categorically render void any law inconsistent with fundamental rights and prohibit the state from enacting such laws in the first place. An indemnity that forecloses investigation, denies victims access to legal remedy, or selectively suspends accountability on political grounds cannot be insulated by Article 46 alone, because constitutional authorisation to indemnify does not override the Constitution’s own internal limits on rights, legality, and equality before law.
Article 46 must therefore be interpreted alongside:
• Article 26 (fundamental rights),
• Article 27 (equality before law),
• Article 31 (protection of law and due process),
• Article 32 (right to life and personal liberty).
To treat Article 46 as a constitutional override clause is to commit a foundational error. No constitutional system, explicitly or implicitly, permits one provision to extinguish the core guarantees of life, equality, and judicial protection.[8]
Comparative constitutional jurisprudence reinforces this point. Indian courts, for instance, have consistently subjected indemnity laws to judicial review where fundamental rights are implicated.[9] South Africa’s Constitutional Court upheld conditional amnesties only because they were embedded within a framework that prioritised truth-seeking and victim-centred principles.[14]
The proposed ordinance contains no such safeguards. It therefore converts Article 46 from a constitutional safety valve into a tool of constitutional sabotage.
Sacralized History and the Ethics of False Equivalence
Invoking the 1973 Liberation War indemnity law as precedent is inaccurate, jurisprudentially incoherent, and historically tone deaf.
The 1971 Liberation War was:
• An international armed conflict,
• Against a foreign occupying power,
• Governed by international humanitarian law.
The July violence, by contrast, occurred within:
• An internal political uprising,
• Against a domestic government,
• Governed by criminal law and constitutional norms.
These are not interchangeable legal universes.
More troubling still is the rhetorical structure of the analogy. In 1971, Pakistani authorities labelled liberation fighters as “criminals” and “terrorists” to justify repression. Today, by declaring one political group categorically virtuous and the other categorically criminal, the state risks replicating the same justificatory logic, merely inverted.
This is a classic instance of Accusation in a Mirror (AiM) at the structural level:
the logic once used to deny justice to liberation victims is now used to deny justice to victims of protester violence.[10] Accusation in a Mirror is not merely a propaganda technique; it is a moral inversion that allows political actors to inherit the ethical language of their former oppressors while disavowing the ethical restraints that once accompanied it. Such symmetry should alarm, not reassure.
It is also worth noting that the 1973 indemnity granted to freedom fighters was never substantively tested or interpreted by the courts, leaving no judicial guidance on the scope, limits, or constitutional boundaries of that protection. The absence of litigation does not transform that indemnity into a precedent for blanket immunity; rather, it underscores that its application remained historically contingent and legally unelaborated. To retroactively treat this unexamined indemnity as an all-purpose template for shielding contemporary political violence is to substitute historical silence for constitutional intent.
Comparative Myths: How “Transition” Is Invoked to Avoid Accountability
The invocation of the Arab Spring as justification is similarly misleading. Post-uprising legal responses varied dramatically, and their outcomes are instructive.
• Tunisia implemented conditional amnesties tied to the Truth and Dignity Commission, preserving accountability for serious crimes.[11]
• Egypt avoided meaningful transitional justice altogether, contributing directly to authoritarian restoration.[12]
• Libya enacted sweeping immunity provisions, resulting in militia impunity and state fragmentation.[13]
The lesson is clear: where accountability is deferred but preserved, transitions stabilise; where immunity is granted without truth, violence metastasises. To cite the Arab Spring without acknowledging these distinctions is not comparative analysis; it is selective mythology.
Transitional Justice or Narrative Control?
Transitional justice is not merely a post-conflict legal arrangement; it is a collective epistemic exercise that determines which violences are rendered intelligible and which are consigned to silence.
Transitional justice is not a synonym for indemnity. It is a structured legal response to systemic wrongdoing, premised on four irreducible pillars:
1. Truth
2. Accountability
3. Victim-centred redress
4. Guarantees of non-recurrence
Invocations of “transitional justice” are often deployed as if the term itself possessed an absolving force, as though merely naming a transition could transmute acts of violence into morally neutral or even laudable necessities. Yet the most frequently cited paradigmatic case of transitional justice, the South African Truth and Reconciliation process, demonstrates precisely the opposite moral posture. In AZAPO v. President of South Africa, the Constitutional Court upheld the conditional grant of amnesty neither as a moral vindication of perpetrators, nor as a reward for revolutionary virtue, but as a tragic and deeply contested compromise in the face of a violent past. [14] The Court acknowledged, explicitly and without euphemism, that amnesty constituted a profound injury to victims’ claims to justice, one tolerated only because it was tethered to full disclosure, public truth-telling, and the exceptional historical circumstances of negotiated transition. Crucially, the judgment refused to convert legal amnesty into moral exoneration, and it resisted any attempt to frame violence as retrospectively justified by political ends. If even this most carefully constrained and morally self-conscious model of transitional justice treated amnesty as a wound rather than a triumph, then the casual invocation of “transitional justice” to justify blanket or pre-emptive immunity for so-called “July fighters,” absent truth, accountability, or institutional restraint, represents not continuity with that tradition, but its hollowing out.
The proposed indemnity framework fails to meet any of these conditions. It:
• Establishes no truth-seeking mechanism,
• Forecloses individual accountability,
• Erases victims of protester violence,
• Freezes a political narrative into statutory/legal form.
An indemnity law without truth cannot be transitional justice; rather, it is the enforcement of a rhetoric by statute.[14]
The Normalisation of Violence as Moral Entitlement
The most dangerous implication of the proposal lies beyond July itself. By insulating a politically defined group from scrutiny, the state sends a jurisprudential signal:
Violence is legally tolerable when committed in the correct political alignment.
This transforms violence from a breakdown of order into a badge of honour or a credential of legitimacy. Once enshrined in law, this principle cannot be confined to a single moment or a single movement.
It guarantees recurrence.
What Kind of Future This Law Makes Possible
The proposed indemnity ordinance is not a neutral legal instrument; it is a political settlement written in the language of law. It replaces individualised responsibility with collective innocence, judicial process with moral allegiance, and accountability with identity.
A transition that produces a new class above the law is not a rupture with authoritarianism; it is its reconfiguration. The concern animating this critique is not retrospective purity but prospective danger. Legal asymmetry today becomes moral permission tomorrow.
Acknowledgement of Intellectual Engagement
While not a legal brief, this essay was written in dialogue with legal scholars and justice practitioners and has benefited from their critical engagement. The remaining errors and/or interpretations are the author’s own.
Notes / References
1. Nazrul, Asif. “Immunity for July Fighters.” Facebook, 8 Jan. 2026, https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1C9YN2ozG3/.
2. “Draft Ordinance Prepared to Grant Indemnity to July Fighters: Law Adviser.” Daily Sun, 9 Jan. 2026, https://www.daily-sun.com/front-page/850584.
3. “Ordinance to Grant Indemnity to July Fighters, Law Adviser Says on Facebook.” Prothom Alo (English), 8 Jan. 2026, https://en.prothomalo.com/amp/story/bangladesh/45yd64x4tm.
4. “Indemnity Ordinance for July Warriors on the Cards: Law Adviser.” The Daily Star, 10 Jan. 2026, thedailystar.net/news/july-warriors-get-immunity-4076591.
5. “July Uprising Cannot Be Questioned in Any Court: Chief Prosecutor.” The Business Standard, 6 Jan. 2026, https://www.tbsnews.net/bangladesh/court/july-uprising-cannot-be-questioned-any-court-chief-prosecutor-1327686.
The use of “so-called” here anticipates the explicit rejection by the International Crimes Tribunal’s Chief Prosecutor that the characterisation of the July uprising and its participants can be questioned in any court. In a January 2026 hearing, the Chief Prosecutor insisted the July movement is recognised as a national liberation struggle and warned that any suggestion to otherwise is “audacious,” effectively situating a particular moral interpretation of July as judicially unchallengeable.
6. Barrios Altos v. Peru. Inter-American Court of Human Rights, Judgment, 2001.
7. United Nations Human Rights Committee. General Comment No. 31: The Nature of the General Legal Obligation Imposed on States Parties to the Covenant. 2004.
8. Dicey, Albert Venn. Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution. Macmillan, 1915.
9. Kasturi Lal v. State of UP; subsequent narrowing in Indian jurisprudence.
10. Stanton, G., “The Ten Stages of Genocide” (AiM framework).
11. ICTJ, Tunisia’s Transitional Justice Process.
12. Brownlee, J., Authoritarianism in an Age of Democratization.
13. UNSMIL Reports on Libya (2012–2016).
14. AZAPO v. President of South Africa. Constitutional Court of South Africa, 1996.
15. Teitel, R., Transitional Justice.
I am Iconus Clustus—justice activist, truth-seeker, and writer. My work is rooted in the unfinished struggle for recognition of the 1971 Bangladesh Genocide. Guided by philosophy, I write to provoke thought, stir conscience, and insist on justice as a shared responsibility.