Bangladesh Holds Its First Decolonizing Law and Criminology Conference at Daffodil International University
Savar, 2 August 2026 — Daffodil International University’s Department of Law and the Daffodil Legal Research Centre hosted the country’s first Decolonizing Law and Criminology Conference on Sunday, at the university’s Smart City campus in Birulia, Savar. Held under the theme “Unshackling the Mind: Decolonizing Law, Criminology, and Justice in Bangladesh,” the programme ran seventy-five papers across fifteen panels in three parallel sessions, framed by an inaugural ceremony and a closing plenary that brought together jurists, government officials, and scholars from several countries.
Dr. Md. Sabur Khan, Chairman of Daffodil International University, spoke as Chief Patron, and the chief guest’s address was delivered by Barrister Mir Mohammad Helal Uddin, State Minister for the Ministry of Land and the Ministry of Chittagong Hill Tracts Affairs. Deputy Attorney General Syeda Shajia Sharmin, Dragan Popovic of UNDP Bangladesh, and Justice M. A. Matin, former judge of the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court, joined as guests, while Dr. Selcuk Aydin of the Enstitü Sosyal in Istanbul delivered the morning keynote. Dr. Muhammad Asadullah convened the conference, which was opened by Professor Dr. Liza Sharmin, Dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences.
Panel 5, “Carceral Legacies, Punishment and Penal Reform,” chaired by Barrister Shyikh Mahdi of the Department of Law, took up a single question in five forms: how much of Bangladesh’s penal system remains a colonial inheritance. Mohammed Jahirul Islam (Carleton University) and Md. Lab Hossain (University of Massachusetts Amherst) opened with a comparison of carceral resistance running from Attica to the Chittagong Hill Tracts, arguing that neither political economy nor decolonial criminology can account for the prison on its own.
The four papers that followed each took a different organ of the same body. Tamjida Akter Rupa (Daffodil International University) read the death penalty as a surviving colonial instrument, noting that Bangladesh still carries thirty-three capital offences. Sanjana Afrin Aishy, Aziza Mahfuz and Sabbir Hossian (University of Dhaka) went inside the Old Dhaka and Keraniganj prisons, reading their architecture alongside the testimony of inmates and officers. Pinak Sarkar (International Standard University) argued that independent Bangladesh did not simply inherit preventive detention but wrote it into the Constitution. Sumayya Rahman (World University of Bangladesh) traced the criminalising of attempted suicide under Section 309 — a Victorian provision that outlived the empire that drafted it. Read together, the papers ran the length of the colonial penal imagination: the condemned, the confined, the detained, and the distressed.
The conference closed with keynotes from Professor Md Rabiul Islam, Dean of Law at Jahangirnagar University; Ram Tiwari, Executive Director of the Nepal Forum for Restorative Justice; and Dr. Jaan Islam of Boğaziçi University, Türkiye, followed by a vote of thanks from Dr. S. M. Saiful Haque, Head of the Department of Law. Five Best Paper Presenter awards were selected from the day’s seventy-five presentations.