Dr. M. Jashim Ali Chowdhury

There are some serious debates around the constitutionality of Bangladesh’s interim government. We have seen attempts to justify it both in terms of Hans Kelsen’s Grundnorm theory and the existing Constitution.

Bangladesh’s Constitution has seen its “basic structures” altered by several amendments. Several of those amendments altered the Constitution so drastically that we tend to call them “constitutional dismemberments”– a term borrowed from Professor Richard Albert of the University of Texas at Austin. The Supreme Court of Bangladesh declared some, such as the Fifth and Seventh, constitutional amendments, unconstitutional. Some, such as the Fifteenth, were never formally challenged.