Listen to this article:

On the evening of April 17 this year, police came to A.M. Hasan Nasim’s home in Dhaka and took him away. His offence was a cartoon. It showed a government MP and quoted a joke the man had himself cracked on the floor of parliament, a joke already printed in the newspapers. A ruling-party activist filed a complaint. The case was booked under the online blackmail section of the brand-new cyber law.

The Daily Star asked the obvious question in an editorial: How does a public joke, reported in the press and turned into a cartoon, become blackmail? Nasim got bail four days later, after students marched at Dhaka University with a banner that read, roughly, “Speech will go on, the pen will go on.”

No one expects a conviction, and no one needs one. Spending four nights in jail is the real punishment. That sums up how the whole system works.

The law changed, but the old habits stayed the same

It’s important to see just how much effort Bangladesh has put into fixing this problem, because that effort makes the failure even clearer.

Section 57 of the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Act, 2006, was abused, so it was replaced by the Digital Security Act (DSA) in 2018. The DSA became a byword for repression, so in 2023 it was replaced by the Cyber Security Act, which Amnesty found had inherited 58 of its 59 provisions. The interim government scrapped the CSA in turn and issued the Cyber Security Ordinance in May 2025, stripping out the clauses that had been used to harass people.

Parliament adopted that ordinance almost verbatim this year as the Cyber Surokkha Act, 2026 (rendered in English variously as the Cyber Protection or Cyber Safety Act). One of the people who helped draft it, Azaher Uddin Anik, has written that the new law does not criminalise defamation or falsehood at all, and only allows the aggrieved person themselves to file a complaint.

Yet within four months of the new government taking office, he found himself watching cases filed by third parties, on behalf of ministers who then disowned them, against people who had done nothing the Act forbids.

Also read: Bangladesh’s 2024 Uprising Changed the Players, Not the Rules

When the cyber law wouldn’t stretch, the police simply reached for something else. Section 54 of the Criminal Procedure Code, the colonial catch-all that lets an officer arrest on suspicion, and which the high court in BLAST v Bangladesh tried to fence in more than two decades ago. And above all the Anti-Terrorism Act, 2009, which the interim government amended in May 2025 to ban the activities of the Awami League and which has since become a general-purpose speech law.

Journalist Anis Alamgir was remanded under it in December for what a complainant described as using social media and talk shows to support the League. Sheikh Tasnim Afroze Imi, a former student union vice-president, was jailed under it in March for playing a recording of Sheikh Mujib’s 1971 speech.

On April 2, according to Human Rights Watch, members of Jubo Dal abducted a man named Shaon Mahmud, handed him to the police at Sreenagar, and he was booked under the ATA for insulting the prime minister on Facebook. Netra News counted at least ten arrests over Facebook content in March and April alone.

Human Rights Watch summed it up: Abuses in the security sector are now deeply rooted, and the police have just shifted their loyalty to new leaders. That’s the real issue. Three governments, three cyber laws, but the same reaction every time.

What is actually going on

If you look past the case numbers, three things are happening at the same time.

First, the arrest itself is the punishment. Everyone knows the charges won’t hold up but that’s not the point. What matters is spending a night at the police station, being photographed in handcuffs and having your family rush to find a lawyer.

Filing a complaint is easy and free, so there’s no reason........

© The Wire