The Impact of Long-Delayed Prosecutions on Fighting Impunity in Bangladesh

This article focuses on the challenges of “long-delayed” prosecutions, that is, criminal prosecutions that begin decades after the conflict, using the experience of the International Criminal Tribunal for Bangladesh (ICT-BD). This issue is still an insufficiently discussed topic, which is important because these types of prosecutions are likely to gain in ascendancy in the future. Although the ICT-BD is a controversial court, this article will sidestep those controversies and will focus mainly on the legal and broader, transitional justice challenges of long-delayed prosecutions. Using Cayley’s categorisation of: (1) crime scenes, (2) witnesses, (3) documents and (4) expert evidence, it finds that the passage of time has a contradictory, twofold effect on evidence. The article concludes that the question of whether long-delayed prosecutions are desirable for a particular society remains highly context-dependent, and in some cases mechanisms other than criminal trials may be better suited to dealing with the past.