The action follows an appeal for the formation of a commission to investigate the deaths of protesters and pave the way towards national unity. The interim government of Bangladesh has prohibited the activities of former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s party, who was removed last year following an uprising led by students.
The caretaker cabinet, led by Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus, resolved to ban the Awami League using the Anti-Terrorism Act, Bangladesh’s law affairs adviser Asif Nazrul said on Saturday evening.
The ban will be lifted when the trial of the party and its leaders for the killings of hundreds of protesters at the International Crimes Tribunal (ICT) is finished, the government stated in the announcement. Awami League student wing Bangladesh Chhatra League was banned in October for being designated as a “terrorist organisation” for its involvement in violent attacks on protesters during the revolt.
Thousands of protesters, including members of a newly established students’ party, had been demonstrating in Dhaka for days demanding that the Awami League be banned. The student wing of the Jamaat-e-Islami party also led the protests in large numbers.
A mass uprising that started as student-led demonstrations in July last year resulted in the removal of Hasina, who had held power in Bangladesh with an iron hand for the past 15 years.
As many as 1,400 individuals could have been murdered over three weeks of anti-Hasina and anti-government protests, a February report by the United Nations human rights office said. Hasina and most of her top party leaders have been charged with murder and other crimes as a consequence.
In his statement, Nazrul also announced the cabinet broadened the scope for prosecution of any political parties on charges of killing during the protests. The amendment to the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Act opens up the way for the Awami League to be prosecuted as an institutional entity for purported crimes committed during its tenure in office.
