Examine the challenges posed by in-absentia trials to principles of natural justice, citing recent examples.

Natural justice rests on audi alteram partem — no one may be condemned unheard. Yet in-absentia trials, permitted under India's BNSS Section 356 [1] and used by Bangladesh's International Crimes Tribunal (ICT), test this principle most sharply when the sentence is capital.

Why states permit trials in absentia

• Preventing absconders from defeating justice: BNSS Section 356 applies only to a proclaimed offender who has absconded with no immediate prospect of arrest [1].
• Closure for victims: Bangladesh's tribunal acted against a crackdown in which, per OHCHR, security forces killed as many as 1,400 people between July and August 2024 [2].

Challenges to natural justice

• Hollowed right to be heard: the accused cannot instruct counsel, cross-examine witnesses or rebut evidence; state-appointed defence lawyers operate without client instructions.
• Risk of bias — "victor's justice": the ICT, created for 1971 Liberation War crimes, was repurposed by an interim government to try the deposed regime, inviting doubts about institutional impartiality.
• Irreversibility of capital sentences: responding to the 17 November 2025 death sentences on Sheikh Hasina and Asaduzzaman Khan Kamal, the UN Human Rights Office stressed that in-absentia capital proceedings make international fair-trial standards "particularly vital", and reiterated its opposition to the death penalty [3].
• Enforceability and diplomatic cost: seven more Awami League leaders, including former minister Obaidul Quader, were sentenced to death in September 2026 [4], yet Hasina remains in exile in New Delhi; the India–Bangladesh Extradition Treaty (2013) [5] allows refusal on political-offence and good-faith grounds, straining bilateral ties.

In-absentia trials are thus a necessary but fragile compromise between accountability and fairness. Their legitimacy improves with strict safeguards — effective service of proclamation, adequately briefed defence counsel, a guaranteed right to retrial on surrender, and avoiding capital punishment where the accused was never heard. Such calibration would honour both the victims' quest for justice and the due-process guarantee that Article 21 and international human rights law equally protect.