Constitution Watchdog Institutional Brief

What Happened

On July 9, 2026, a four-member bench of the Appellate Division, comprising Chief Justice Zubayer Rahman Chowdhury, Justice Md. Ashfaqul Islam, Justice Md. Rezaul Haque and Justice S. M. Emdadul Hoque, dismissed three separate appeals that had asked the Court to strike down the entire Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution. The Supreme Court’s official cause list records the result in each appeal simply as: “Appeal is dismissed.” Because the appeals were dismissed, the operative result of the High Court judgment of December 17, 2024 remains binding and operative, subject to any review proceedings.

A few things need to be said plainly before anything else.

First, this is a partial decision, not a sweeping one. The Fifteenth Amendment altered 54 provisions of the Constitution. The courts struck down only a handful of provisions and left the rest for Parliament. The appellants, who included Badiul Alam Majumder and others, along with Jamaat-e-Islami, had asked for the whole amendment to be thrown out. They did not get that.

Second, we do not yet have the Appellate Division’s own reasoning. What we have so far is the outcome of a short order. Journalists were not even allowed inside the courtroom on the day the verdict was read. Because the appeals were simply dismissed, the operative result of the High Court judgment stands, but until the Appellate Division publishes its full reasons, it should not be assumed that it adopted every part of the High Court’s reasoning, only that it left the result undisturbed.

Third, this ruling should not be read as speaking to the country’s present government. Bangladesh’s interim administration, led by Muhammad Yunus, ended on February 17, 2026, when Tarique Rahman was sworn in as prime minister following his party’s landslide win in the general election held on February 12, 2026. Some reports on the July 9 ruling repeated an older line, that the caretaker arrangement would not govern “the present transitional interim administration,” which appears to be recycled language from earlier coverage rather than an accurate description of the country’s current constitutional position. The ruling does not retroactively unsettle the arrangements under which the February 2026 election was conducted.

Fourth, and this is important context that easily gets lost, a referendum on the July National Charter’s reform package was already held, alongside the February 12 election, and was approved by a majority of valid votes. The charter’s proposed reforms include term limits and checks on executive power, among other changes. So when this brief discusses the referendum requirement under Article 142, it is discussing a constitutional mechanism now judicially confirmed as revived, not a referendum that is still pending. That specific July Charter referendum has already taken place and produced a result; how its mandate is implemented through Parliament, and how it is reconciled with the various court judgments discussed below, is the live question, not whether it will happen.

What Was Struck Down

The following provisions remain invalidated following the dismissal of the appeals.

• The ban on the caretaker government system: Sections 20 and 21 of the Fifteenth Amendment, which had abolished the non-party caretaker government that used to run the country during elections, were declared void for undermining the Constitution’s basic structure.
• Article 7A: This provision had made the abrogation, suspension or subversion of the Constitution a constitutional offence carrying the highest punishment prescribed for other offences. It has been struck down.
• Article 7B: This provision had tried to make certain parts of the Constitution permanently unchangeable, even by a future parliament. This specific entrenchment clause has been struck down. It is worth being precise about what this does and does not mean. Article 7B’s own express list of unamendable provisions is gone. This does not abolish the separate, judge-made basic structure doctrine itself, under which certain constitutional amendments can still be reviewed and invalidated by courts. In other words, Parliament no longer faces a textual lock Article 7B tried to install, but it still faces the older, broader doctrine the courts apply independently.
• Article 44(2): This provision would have allowed Parliament to give other courts fundamental rights enforcement powers similar to the High Court’s, within defined limits. It has been declared void. It is worth noting that the provision itself only authorized Parliament to extend such jurisdiction; nothing in the record we have reviewed shows Parliament had actually used it to confer this power on any specific court. So the accurate description of the practical effect is that Parliament can no longer rely on Article 44(2) as constitutional authority to do so going forward, not that any court’s existing jurisdiction has been taken away.
• The referendum requirement: The Fifteenth Amendment had removed a rule requiring a public referendum before certain major constitutional changes could take effect. The High Court expressly ordered that the earlier referendum provision be restored, and this has been left undisturbed by the dismissal of the appeals.

What Survives, and Why That Deserves Attention

It would be easy to read headlines about this ruling and assume the entire 2011 amendment has been wiped away. That is not accurate, and the distinction matters because it changes how far-reaching this ruling actually is.

The High Court left the remaining provisions of the amendment for Parliament to reconsider, and it said so in terms tied to the ordinary constitutional amendment process, not ordinary legislation. Any future change to those remaining provisions would need to go through the amendment procedure under Article 142, including the parliamentary supermajority that procedure requires, not a simple majority vote.

Provisions that remain in force for now include the constitutional recognition of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman as Father of the Nation, the increase in reserved parliamentary seats for women from 45 to 50, the restoration of secularism and freedom of religion as constitutional values, and the reinstatement of nationalism, socialism, democracy and secularism as guiding principles of state policy.

This shows the courts did not erase everything the 2011 parliament did. They picked out specific provisions found to conflict with the Constitution’s basic structure and left everything else for elected representatives, acting through the proper amendment procedure, to revisit if they choose.

The Legal Idea Behind the Ruling, and Two Fair Ways to Read It

The ruling rests on the basic structure doctrine, first recognized in Bangladesh in a 1989 case. The idea is that some features of a constitution are so central to what the constitution is that even Parliament, exercising its amending power under Article 142, cannot remove them. Free and fair elections, and popular sovereignty more broadly, have been treated by the courts as falling into that category.

There are two honest ways to look at how this doctrine was applied here, and both deserve a hearing.

One view holds that the courts got this right. The caretaker system existed to solve a real, documented problem: incumbent governments controlling the machinery of their own elections. Removing that safeguard in 2011 took away something that had become essential to how the country holds fair elections. Restoring it corrects a genuine democratic loss. On this view, invalidating Article 7B’s entrenchment clause was equally justified, because no parliament should be able to permanently wall off its own decisions from future amendment simply by inserting such a restriction into the constitutional amendment itself. If any part of the Constitution truly cannot be changed, that has to be recognized through the Constitution’s own deeper structure as interpreted by courts, not created by a clause Parliament writes about itself.

The other view raises a fair concern. The Fifteenth Amendment received the parliamentary supermajority that the Constitution requires for amendments, though whether it complied with other constitutional requirements, particularly around the referendum mechanism, was itself the matter in dispute. When courts decide that certain outcomes are simply off-limits regardless of how properly they were adopted through the required procedure, they are substituting their own judgment for Parliament’s on a question the Constitution assigns to Parliament by name. This concern applies with particular force to Article 7B. Whatever one thinks about Parliament attempting to bind its successors, Article 7B was enacted with the parliamentary supermajority prescribed by Article 142. A court invalidating it is therefore holding that even a formally enacted constitutional amendment remains subject to substantive constitutional limits.

There is also a genuine technical debate worth stating fairly rather than resolving by assertion. Some commentators have pointed to the general legal principle, reflected in Section 7 of the General Clauses Act, that striking down a provision which repealed an earlier law does not automatically revive that earlier law; revival ordinarily needs to be express. That objection remains an important question of constitutional method. It should be read alongside the fact that the High Court expressly ordered the referendum provision restored, using language to that effect, and that the Appellate Division separately, in its November 20, 2025 judgment concerning the Thirteenth Amendment, expressly ordered the prospective revival and activation of the caretaker government provisions, a judgment whose full text was published in March 2026. So the objection remains a fair one to raise about method and reasoning, but it should not be read as implying that neither system currently has any operative legal basis. Both have been the subject of express revival orders by the courts.

This points to something that deserves its own clear explanation: the July 9, 2026 dismissal and the November 20, 2025 judgment are two separate proceedings that arrived at complementary results. The November 2025 case was a review of the earlier 2011 Appellate Division judgment on the Thirteenth Amendment, and it is that case, not the July 2026 appeals, which did the primary work of reviving and activating the caretaker system prospectively. The July 2026 appeals concerned a separate challenge to the Fifteenth Amendment itself, brought through the High Court’s December 2024 judgment. Readers should not come away thinking the July 2026 case was the first or sole source of the caretaker system’s revival. It left undisturbed a result that, on the caretaker question specifically, had already been substantially settled by the November 2025 judgment.

A further, broader point is worth making without overstating it. Bangladesh’s courts have reconsidered the caretaker government question repeatedly over a relatively short span, including the original High Court ruling that upheld the arrangement, the 2011 Appellate Division judgment that led to its abolition, the December 2024 High Court judgment, the November 2025 Appellate Division review, and now the July 2026 dismissal. Regardless of one’s view of the latest outcome, this level of doctrinal change within a comparatively short period raises legitimate questions about constitutional predictability and the relationship between judicial doctrine and shifting political conditions. Constitution Watchdog raises this as a fair question about institutional stability, not as a claim that any particular ruling was decided to suit whichever government held power at the time; that would be a serious allegation requiring evidence about judicial appointments, party positions, and political circumstances that goes beyond what this brief can establish.

What Constitution Watchdog Will Watch Next

We will track the publication of any formal orders or detailed reasons arising from the July 9 dismissal, particularly how the Appellate Division explains its treatment of Article 7B and the revival question.

We will track how Parliament reconciles this ruling with the July National Charter mandate that voters already approved on February 12, 2026, and with the separate November 20, 2025 Appellate Division judgment on the caretaker system. We will also track any further review petitions or litigation arising from either proceeding.

This brief will be updated as further primary material becomes available. Constitution Watchdog takes no institutional position on the caretaker government system as a matter of policy. Our interest is in the doctrinal coherence, procedural transparency, and constitutional accountability of how these questions have been resolved.