Bangladesh tribunal orders three journalists held over questions asked at Hasina press conference

A special war crimes tribunal in Dhaka ordered Monday that three senior Bangladeshi journalists be kept in jail until they stand trial on charges tied to the mass uprising that toppled Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina in 2024, a ruling that press freedom groups immediately condemned as an attempt to criminalize routine reporting.

The International Crimes Tribunal, the same court that has already sentenced Hasina to death in absentia, directed prison authorities to produce Mozammel Babu, founder and former editor-in-chief of Ekattor Television; Farzana Rupa, the channel's former principal correspondent; and Shyamal Dutta, editor of the daily Bhorer Kagoj and a former general secretary of the National Press Club, before the court on August 24. The judge set October 25 for the next hearing and ordered investigators to file their findings by then.

Prosecutors say the three incited the suppression of student demonstrators by asking Hasina "provocative questions" at a press conference on July 14, 2024. At that briefing, Hasina responded to a question about quota protesters with a remark invoking the term "razakar" — a slur for collaborators with Pakistan's army during Bangladesh's 1971 war of independence — after being asked why demonstrators objected so strongly to civil-service hiring quotas for descendants of independence fighters. The comment detonated overnight protests across university campuses and is widely cited as the spark that turned a quota dispute into the uprising that drove Hasina from power a month later, after a crackdown that killed hundreds of people.

The numbers

Babu and Rupa were arrested in May 2026 and were already facing a separate case dating to a 2013 security crackdown; Dutta has been detained since September 2024 and faces multiple murder cases tied to the uprising. Because Bangladesh's tribunal law carries no fixed sentencing guidelines, the journalists face potential death sentences if convicted — the same maximum penalty the tribunal has already imposed on Hasina herself, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. The United Nations human rights office found that security forces and Awami League-linked groups were responsible for hundreds of extrajudicial killings and thousands of serious injuries during the six weeks of unrest the tribunal is now adjudicating.

How Bangladesh got here

Hasina fled to India in August 2024 as the uprising reached her residence, ending a 15-year rule. An interim administration led by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Muhammad Yunus took power, revived the tribunal originally created to try 1971 war crimes, and used it to pursue Hasina and dozens of former officials and allies. Yunus's caretaker government handed power in February 2026 to a Bangladesh Nationalist Party-led government under Prime Minister Tarique Rahman, but the tribunal's docket has kept expanding since, with more than thirty journalists now facing complaints before it over their coverage of, or proximity to, the ousted administration. Hasina was convicted in absentia earlier this year on crimes-against-humanity charges connected to the crackdown, and Dhaka has separately pressed India, where she remains in exile, for her extradition without success.

Ekattor Television, the channel Babu and Rupa helped build into one of Bangladesh's most-watched private broadcasters, was widely seen during Hasina's tenure as sympathetic to her Awami League government, a reputation that has shaped how both supporters and critics of the tribunal read the case. Dutta's Bhorer Kagoj and his tenure atop the National Press Club gave him a different kind of prominence, as an institutional voice for the country's journalism establishment rather than a broadcast personality. Prosecutors have not disputed that all three were simply doing their jobs as reporters and editors on July 14, 2024; their argument instead is that the specific question put to Hasina was designed to provoke the inflammatory response that followed, a theory defense lawyers call an unprecedented stretch of incitement law.

Who is affected

Press freedom advocates say the case marks an escalation from prosecuting officials and security officers to prosecuting the reporters who covered them. CPJ said the theory that a reporter's question can constitute incitement sets a standard that could be turned against any journalist who interviews a controversial official. UNESCO, which has run a legal support desk for journalists in Bangladesh since 2024 in response to a wave of post-uprising cases against reporters, has flagged the country's media environment as newly precarious even after Hasina's departure was meant to open space for a freer press.

Reaction

CPJ's Asia-Pacific program coordinator, Kunal Majumder, said the prosecution conflated editorial judgment with criminal wrongdoing.

"Editorial decisions may be partisan or ethically questionable, but they cannot be criminalized," Majumder said, calling the tribunal's case against the three journalists outrageous and demanding the charges be dropped.

Bangladeshi officials have defended the tribunal's independence and say the journalists are being investigated for their alleged role in events that led to mass killings, not for the act of reporting itself. Family members of Babu, Rupa and Dutta have petitioned for bail at each hearing; all three requests have been denied since their arrests, and defense lawyers say their clients have now spent between eleven months and roughly two years in custody without a trial date being set until Monday's order.

The tribunal's investigators must submit their evidentiary findings against the three journalists before the October 25 hearing, at which the panel is expected to decide whether to formally frame charges and set a trial date. Rights groups including CPJ and Reporters Without Borders say they will keep pressing Dhaka to release the journalists on bail in the meantime, while the broader docket of complaints against dozens of other reporters continues to move through the same court, keeping Bangladesh's press corps under a legal cloud more than two years after the uprising that was supposed to end it.