Bangladesh’s courts are widely criticized as slow, overburdened, and difficult to access. With more than 4.5 million cases pending across the country’s court system, the machinery of justice frequently stalls, denying litigants timely resolution and eroding public confidence in the rule of law. For many, justice has become a procedural aspiration rather than a substantive guarantee. The White Paper on Judicial Reforms (2024), prepared by the Bangladesh Judiciary Reform Commission, seeks to address this systemic crisis through a suite of proposals encompassing digital courts, revised appointment mechanisms, expanded legal aid, and performance-based accountability for the judiciary. The proposals are ambitious and, in many respects, overdue. Yet the White Paper raises a foundational question that its authors do not adequately answer: how precisely will these changes be implemented and by whom, with what resources and within what time frame?
The centerpiece of the White Paper’s reform agenda is technology-driven modernization. This is not an unprecedented ambition for Bangladesh. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the government introduced virtual courts and electronic filing in select urban courts, enabling hearings to continue despite nationwide disruption. The United Nations Development Programme documented this experience favorably, noting that such measures helped maintain court functionality and enabled online case processing during an otherwise paralyzing public health crisis. These innovations demonstrated that digital tools could be adapted to Bangladesh’s judicial environment. However, the pandemic-era experiments were emergency interventions, concentrated in urban jurisdictions and dependent on temporary institutional momentum. Sustained, nationwide digitalization is a qualitatively different undertaking. It requires substantial infrastructure investment, comprehensive training of judicial and administrative staff, ongoing technical support and mechanisms to ensure equitable access across the geographic and socioeconomic spectrum. The White Paper does not articulate a credible plan for any of these prerequisites, raising the risk that its digital reform proposals will remain aspirational rather than operational.
Bangladesh’s long-standing institutional constraints compound this risk. Transparency International Bangladesh and similar organizations have documented chronic underfunding of the subordinate judiciary, including inadequate physical infrastructure, insufficient logistical support, and shortages of qualified court personnel. These are not peripheral concerns; they are structural barriers that any credible reform agenda must directly address. Absent a clear and ring-fenced financing plan, the White Paper’s technological ambitions may amount to little more than a vision statement. The lesson from comparable reform efforts across South and Southeast Asia is consistent, digital transformation in judiciaries that lack basic institutional capacity typically produces uneven outcomes, deepening existing disparities between well-resourced urban courts and under-served rural ones.
The same tension between ambition and institutional reality pervades the White Paper’s proposals on judicial appointments. The document proposes a collegium-style system as a mechanism to reduce executive influence over judicial selection a commendable goal in principle, given the well-documented concerns about the politicization of appointments to both the superior and subordinate courts. However, the proposal is incomplete. It does not specify transparent selection criteria, establish conflict-of-interest rules for collegium members, or provide any appeal or review mechanism for appointment decisions. Without these safeguards, a collegium system may merely redistribute informal influence rather than eliminate it. This concern is not hypothetical: recent episodes of ad-hoc judicial appointments in Bangladesh, which attracted considerable criticism from the legal community, demonstrate how easily formal processes can be displaced by informal ones. The critical question is not whether a new appointment body should be created, but whether its design contains sufficient structural integrity to resist the patronage dynamics that have undermined previous reform efforts. Will a new system change behavior, or will it simply provide institutional cover for existing practices?
The chronic case backlog that defines Bangladesh’s judicial crisis carries consequences well beyond the courtroom. Contract enforcement delays impose significant costs on businesses, undermine investor confidence, and erode the legal predictability that a functioning market economy requires. The White Paper acknowledges this dimension of the problem, but its proposed solutions are uneven. Alternative dispute resolution (ADR) is identified as a pressure-relieving mechanism, and the evidence from other jurisdictions supports its efficacy in principle. However, many of Bangladesh’s districts lack trained mediators, adequate legal aid infrastructure, and the institutional framework necessary to make ADR genuinely accessible to ordinary litigants. Without a deliberate strategy to bridge the rural-urban gap in legal services, ADR risks becoming a solution tailored to urban, commercially sophisticated disputants rather than a national instrument of justice delivery.
A further concern lies in the methodology of reform itself. The White Paper’s proposals are predominantly top-down in their conception. There is no indication that the document incorporates systematic input from subordinate court judges, practicing lawyers in rural jurisdictions, or the ordinary litigants whose experiences should inform any serious reform agenda. This is a significant gap. Reforms designed without reference to the practitioners and users who navigate the system daily are prone to overlook implementation barriers that are invisible from a policy elevation. Bangladesh’s own legislative history provides a cautionary example: the Law and Order Disruption (Speedy Trial) Act, 2002, was introduced with explicit commitments to accelerate case resolution, yet in practice became subject to repeated renewals and produced no sustained reduction in delays. The Act’s failure was not primarily one of legislative design but of institutional follow-through precisely the dimension in which the White Paper remains most underdeveloped.
It would be unfair to dismiss the White Paper’s contributions entirely. Its recognition of the urgency of judicial reform is genuine, and its attention to access to justice as a substantive concern rather than a technical one is welcome. However, expanding access to justice through legal aid and simplified procedures will not automatically improve outcomes if the underlying institutional system remains overloaded. As the UNDP’s Rule of Law programme has observed, where judicial capacity is insufficient (too few judges, inadequate court facilities, absent case management systems), increasing the volume of cases entering the system can actually worsen delays rather than alleviate them. Meaningful access to justice therefore requires parallel investment in supply-side capacity: more judges, better facilities, and functional case management. Demand-side reforms pursued in isolation may, paradoxically, deepen the very problem they are designed to address.
Some reform advocates have drawn comparisons between Bangladesh’s aspirations and Singapore’s efficient, technology-integrated judiciary. The comparison is instructive, but not in the way its proponents intend. Singapore’s judicial performance is the product of decades of sustained public investment, a highly disciplined civil service, robust anti-corruption institutions and conditions of political stability that Bangladesh does not presently share. Transplanting the surface features of Singapore’s system without replicating the underlying conditions is unlikely to produce comparable results. A more productive approach would be to identify, among the White Paper’s many proposals, those that can realistically be implemented within existing institutional and financial constraints. Focused interventions such as enhanced judicial remuneration to attract and retain qualified personnel and the establishment of legal aid centers in underserved districts as a precondition for ADR expansion may be more modest in ambition but are more firmly grounded in Bangladesh’s actual institutional landscape.
The White Paper on Judicial Reforms occupies an uneasy position between diagnosis and prescription. It identifies the pathologies of Bangladesh’s justice system with reasonable accuracy, and its articulation of the problem merits serious engagement. Yet it hesitates at the critical juncture the translation of diagnosis into implementable solutions backed by institutional commitment and adequate resources. Bangladesh’s history of ambitious but stalled reform is not, as the 2025 reporting on the Judiciary Reform Commission has made clear, a problem of deficient ideas. It is a problem of sustained political will and implementation capacity. The White Paper, as currently drafted, is more likely to become another entry in that history than a departure from it unless it is followed by concrete sequencing, designated institutional responsibility, and independent monitoring. The real test of the White Paper is not whether it has correctly diagnosed what ails Bangladesh’s courts. It has. The test is whether those who commissioned it are prepared to act on what they already know.
Sameera Khan is a student of the Law Department at Notre Dame University Bangladesh.