Since 1999, Bangladesh’s judiciary has waited for genuine institutional independence. In that year, the Appellate Division decided Secretary, Ministry of Finance v. Masdar Hossain (1999) 52 DLR (AD) 82 (the Masdar Hossain case), often described as the charter of judicial independence in Bangladesh. The Court issued twelve binding directions to free the subordinate judiciary from executive control, including directions on service structure, appointments, discipline and the creation of a separate Judicial Service Commission. Subordinate courts district courts and the lower courts beneath the High Court Division that handle the bulk of ordinary citizens disputes were supposed to be shielded from executive influence by these measures. Yet for the next twenty-six years, successive governments across the political spectrum largely failed to implement the Court’s instructions.
An interim government finally moved decisively on November 30, 2025, by promulgating the Supreme Court Secretariat Ordinance, 2025, which created a dedicated administrative body for the judiciary. This was a genuinely historic change: for the first time, the Supreme Court would have its secretariat with separate administrative and financial authority. But this reform proved short-lived. On April 9, 2026, the Jatiya Sangsad passed the Supreme Court Secretariat (Repeal) Bill, 2026, dismantling the framework that had taken more than two decades of advocacy, litigation, and negotiation to build. In this article, I argue that this parliamentary move is not a cautious procedural correction but a profound reversal of law that risks re‑entrenching executive control over Bangladesh’s courts.
What the Secretariat actually changed
To understand the scale of this reversal, we must first recall what the 2025 Ordinance created. The Secretariat delivered three concrete gains: administrative autonomy, financial autonomy and personnel autonomy for the subordinate judiciary.
First, it provided administrative autonomy. The Secretariat acquired the power to determine the number, structure and territorial jurisdiction of subordinate courts functions that had previously been exercised by the Ministry of Law. The change shifted the design of the court system from the executive branch to an institution anchored in the judiciary itself.
Second, it delivered financial autonomy. Before this reform, the Law Ministry prepared and controlled the judiciary’s entire budget, a practice that produced delays in approvals and impeded the utilisation of allocated funds. Under the new arrangement, the Secretariat could prepare its budget statement, while the Chief Justice would serve as the final authority over expenditures within that budget. This change aligned resource decisions more closely with judicial needs rather than executive priorities.
Third and most consequentially, the Secretariat transferred control over personnel management postings, promotions, transfers, leave and discipline of lower court judges from the Ministry of Law to the Supreme Court’s own administration. Bangladesh has only 2,302 judges managing more than 4.652 million pending cases, with each judge handling, on average, around 2,016 cases. In this context, the ability to deploy judges efficiently and fairly, free from executive interference, is not a luxury but a justice imperative.
To operationalise the Secretariat, a Post-Creation Committee headed by Chief Justice approved 107 officer posts and 382 staff positions, providing the new body with its initial workforce. The Supreme Court Registrar General was appointed as the first acting secretary of the newly formed Secretariat on December 1, 2025 and the Secretariat’s physical office was officially inaugurated shortly afterwards, on December 11, 2025. By the time Parliament took up the repeal, the Secretariat was no longer a theoretical construct; it was a functioning institution with appointed officers, allocated posts and an emerging administrative practice.
Article 116 and constitutional terrain
Critics of the Ordinance have pointed to Article 116 of the Constitution of the People’s Republic of Bangladesh (hereinafter referred to as ‘the Constitution’) as a central source of tension. In simple terms, Article 116 authorises the President to control postings, promotions, leave and discipline of persons employed in the judicial service and magistrates exercising judicial functions, “in consultation with the Supreme Court”. Any ordinary law that effectively shifts this control in practice, without formally amending Article 116, stands on unstable constitutional ground.
Constitutional expert Shahdeen Malik has argued that a law inconsistent with the Constitution is void from its inception. This concern applies to the Secretariat to the extent that the Ordinance purported to relocate powers that Article 116 still vested in the executive. However, this is not the end of the story.
In an opinion adopted in September 2025, the full text of which was published on April 7, 2026, the High Court Division upheld the institutional rationale behind creating the Secretariat. The Court effectively restored the original 1972 version of Article 116, which had placed supervisory power over the subordinate judiciary squarely under the Supreme Court rather than the executive. It further directed the government to establish the Secretariat within three months. In other words, the High Court did not reject the idea of a judicial secretariat as unconstitutional; it interpreted the Constitution in a way that makes such a body necessary and ordered the executive to create it.
Seen in this light, the Ordinance’s defects were real but correctable. The appropriate response was to amend the legal framework so that the Secretariat fully aligned with the Constitution as interpreted by the High Court by formally revising Article 116, clarifying powers and adjusting institutional design without abolishing the Secretariat altogether.
The Repeal Bill and its justification
The Jatiya Sangsad passed the Supreme Court Secretariat (Repeal) Bill, 2026, on April 9, 2026. In moving the legislation, Law Minister Md. Asaduzzaman argued that the Ordinance required further consultation and examination with stakeholders before any such significant institutional transformation could go forward. This justification sits uneasily with the history of the issue.
Bangladesh debated judicial independence intensively for twenty-six years between the Masdar Hossain decision and the 2025 Ordinance. Former Law Adviser Dr. Asif Nazrul has publicly acknowledged that serious attempts at reform in 2006 and 2007 were already made but failed. By late 2025, the Secretariat had been inaugurated, staff posts had been approved, and officers were already serving within the new structure. The Repeal Bill includes a “savings” clause that protects past administrative actions, but it simultaneously eliminates the institutional framework needed to carry the reform forward. What is presented as procedural caution more consultation, more deliberation is, in substance, a structural rollback.
There is also a basic rule-of-law concern. The High Court had, only days before, issued a detailed judgement approving the Secretariat’s institutional logic and directing the executive to establish it within a specific timeframe. Parliament’s response, two days after the publication of the full judgement, was to repeal the only operative legal framework for doing so. This sequence signals not a careful harmonisation of law and the Constitution but a political refusal to accept a judicially mandated rebalancing of power between the executive and the courts.
Executive presence within the Secretariat
It is important to acknowledge that the Secretariat Ordinance itself embodied compromises that kept a measure of executive influence within the new structure. Under the Ordinance, the governing body of the Secretariat was the Secretariat Commission, composed of the Chief Justice, the Law Adviser, and the Attorney General of Bangladesh, among others. Article 64 of the Constitution designates the Attorney General as the government’s chief legal adviser and its principal representative before the Supreme Court. Placing the Attorney General on the governing body of judicial administration therefore reinserted the executive into the very institution that was supposed to shield the judiciary from executive control.
Advocate SM Azmal Hossain, Convener of the National Lawyers Alliance, described the Attorney General’s inclusion as constitutionally inappropriate. This critique is well‑founded. The remedy, however, lay in recalibrating the composition of the Commission by removing or limiting executive-office holders and ensuring that those who sit on it do so in a judicial, not governmental, capacity. The existence of executive representation on the Commission was a design flaw; it was not a reason to abandon the project of a judicial secretariat altogether.
By seizing on the Ordinance’s imperfections as a pretext for complete repeal, the elected government chose reversal over repair. Instead of using parliamentary authority to refine and constitutionalise the Secretariat, it used that authority to dismantle the only viable framework for building genuine judicial autonomy.
A reversal with long-term consequences
This reversal must be seen against the long arc of Bangladesh’s constitutional history. Executive control over judicial postings, promotions, and discipline has rarely remained dormant; rather, it has repeatedly been used to reward compliance and punish independence. The Masdar Hossain case attempted to curb this pattern through judicial directions. The twenty-six-year delay between that decision and the 2025 Ordinance reflected deep political reluctance to cede control over the subordinate judiciary.
The 2026 repeal expresses the same reluctance in a new form. It restores, in practice, a system in which the executive holds the levers of control over judges, while the courts are left to bear public responsibility for delays, backlogs, and perceived failures. Even the strongest constitutional text on judicial independence is fragile if it is not supported by institutions that elected governments cannot easily abolish whenever those institutions begin to work as intended.
If Bangladesh is serious about judicial independence, it must move beyond temporary ordinances and reversible administrative arrangements. It needs a constitutionally grounded judicial secretariat, designed in line with the High Court’s interpretation of Article 116, insulated from executive capture, and backed by a political consensus that judicial autonomy is in the long-term interest of all parties rather than a threat to whichever government happens to be in power.
Mir Fahmida Sultana is a final-year LL.B. (Hons) student at Uttara University.