The Article was originally published in the Deltagram on Saturday, 11 July 2026 08.00 pm
EXCLUSIVE: Awami League leaders doubt Hasina’s promised December return while death sentence stands
Two senior insiders tell ‘The Deltagram’ Hasina won’t return while her death sentence stands despite what she told Reuters
Political Correspondent
Sat 11 Jul 2026 08.00 pm (GMT+6)
Sheikh Hasina was sentenced to death by Bangladesh’s International Crimes Tribunal in November 2025. Photo: AFP
Sheikh Hasina told Reuters in a recent interview that she’ll return to Bangladesh in December, bringing with her the Awami League leaders who fled the country alongside her. But according to two senior party figures who spoke to The Deltagram, that promise may not hold: neither Hasina nor the party’s top leadership, they say, has any real intention of going back to Dhaka while her death sentence from the International Crimes Tribunal remains in force.
Hasina fled to India last August after a student-led uprising toppled her government, and was later convicted in absentia by the tribunal of crimes against humanity over the deadly crackdown on protesters.
“She’s not going to return to Bangladesh as long as the death penalty remains in effect,” said one of the leaders, who is now based near the Bhutanese capital, Thimphu.
A second leader, living near Jamshedji Tata Road in New Town of Calcutta (Kolkata), said Hasina’s legal options have narrowed to almost nothing. We’d talked to lawyers in India, the leader said, and it appeared she had no option left but to seek a mercy petition from the president, one she reportedly fears would be rejected anyway. The Thimphu-based leader went further, saying Hasina doesn’t want to go to jail, let alone face execution.
Both leaders said the point of talking up a return now is to reenergise the party’s grassroots supporters, who feel abandoned. Haji Fariduddin Bepari, an Awami League activist in Nagarkanda upazila, Faridpur, put it more bluntly.
“We’ve been hearing about her return for the last two years. She said she wouldn’t abandon us. But for the last 24 months, no Awami League leader has asked me how I’m surviving,” he said.
Bepari said he’d voted for the Bangladesh Nationalist Party in this year’s general election, photographed his ballot and showed it to his local BNP leader afterwards. Asked whether that troubled him, he pointed to the Awami League’s role in suppressing the July uprising. “I didn’t have any problem with that. We’ve committed sins, and that’s a small price to pay,” he said.
Mahmud Ali, an Awami League worker from Barakhain in Chittagong, believes it’ll take a decade to rebuild the party, and that it won’t happen under Hasina’s leadership at all.
The Deltagram put these claims to the Awami League’s office; it had not responded by the time of publication.
For Hasina herself, the legal road has effectively run out, according to Barrister Shyikh Mahdi, a prosecutor at the International Crimes Tribunal. He said a presidential mercy petition is now her only remaining option.
“Section 21 of the International Crimes (Tribunals) Act 1973 provides that any person convicted and sentenced by the tribunal has a statutory right to appeal to the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court,” Mahdi said. “But the appeal must be filed within 30 days of the conviction and sentence, after which no appeal is maintainable under the act.”
Hasina was convicted and sentenced to death by the tribunal in November 2025. By July 2026, that 30-day window had long since closed. The prosecution, though, did lodge a timely appeal against one part of the ruling, the count on which Hasina had received life imprisonment, seeking to have that sentence enhanced to death as well.