NATIONAL
Parliament passes bill setting death penalty as maximum punishment for online drug trade
|ARAFIN AHMED NEON
BIONIC READING
In a Nutshell:
- Home Minister Salahuddin Ahmed placed the bill in the House, and it was passed by voice vote after proposals for public opinion verification, referral to a scrutiny committee, and amendments were all disposed of.
- The amendment criminalises buying, selling, supplying, advertising, mediating, or communicating about narcotics through websites, social media, mobile applications, online platforms, electronic communication systems, or digital payment tools including e-wallets, virtual assets, and cryptocurrencies.
- The punishment for such offences will be imprisonment for any term or a maximum sentence of death, along with a fine of up to Tk 20 lakh, and recovery of narcotics from the accused will not be mandatory for prosecution.
Why it Matters
Drug trafficking in Bangladesh has increasingly moved to digital platforms, and this amendment represents the most significant expansion of narcotics law in the country in years, extending capital punishment into an entirely new domain of criminal activity.
- The amendment removes the requirement to recover narcotics from the accused to secure a conviction, which significantly lowers the evidentiary bar for prosecution and gives law enforcement broader powers to act on digital evidence alone.
- The bill also grants firearm authority and dog squads to the Department of Narcotics Control and allows separate narcotics crime suppression tribunals to be established in drug-prone areas, expanding the institutional machinery of enforcement alongside the legal penalties.
- Home Minister Salahuddin Ahmed acknowledged during the session that law enforcement personnel have themselves been implicated in drug trading, saying "No one is being spared in such cases. Administrative action is being taken against them," which signals that the amendment is being introduced against a backdrop of institutional credibility concerns.
What We Think
Bangladesh has expanded the scope of the death penalty, and that is a decision with consequences that go beyond drug enforcement and deserve more scrutiny than a voice vote allows.
- Removing the requirement to recover narcotics from the accused in order to prosecute means a conviction can now rest on digital evidence alone, in a legal environment where digital forensics standards, chain of custody protocols, and judicial oversight of electronic surveillance are not uniformly established.
- The death penalty for digital drug offences places Bangladesh among a small number of countries globally that apply capital punishment to narcotics crimes, a practice that has faced sustained international criticism for disproportionality and irreversibility, particularly where wrongful convictions are possible.
- The home minister's acknowledgement that law enforcement personnel are involved in drug trading is not a reassurance that the new powers will be used fairly. It is a reason to ask who will oversee how those powers are applied, and the bill as passed does not appear to answer that question.
