When Emergency Powers Meet Civil Liberties: A Study in Contrast
On August 29, 2020, approximately 38,000 people gathered in Berlin to protest Germany's COVID-19 restrictions. Some waved the old German Imperial flag in front of the Reichstag. Others drew comparisons between Angela Merkel's government and National Socialism — analogies that most Germans found offensive and historically illiterate, but which a functioning constitutional system allowed them to make in public, loudly, without being arrested. Berlin's administrative court had, on the eve of the rally, sided with the demonstrators: there was no indication that organizers would deliberately ignore social distancing rules, and blanket bans on assembly without case-by-case assessment violated constitutional protections. Police could enforce compliance; they could not suppress the protest altogether.
On May 5, 2020 — three months earlier — officers of Bangladesh's Rapid Action Battalion abducted writer Mushtaq Ahmed and cartoonist Ahmed Kabir Kishore from their homes in Dhaka. They were held for hours without official acknowledgment before being formally arrested under the Digital Security Act, charged with "spreading rumours and misinformation on Facebook about the coronavirus situation" and "undermining the image of the father of the nation." Ahmed would be denied bail at least six times. He died on February 25, 2021 — nine months and twenty days after his arrest — while in pre-trial detention at Kashimpur Jail, having never been tried. A cartoonist, Kishore, alleged he had been tortured in custody and appeared visibly injured when brought before a court two days before Ahmed's death.
These two episodes — one a constitutional democracy stress-testing the limits of public health restrictions against the right of assembly, the other a government using a pandemic as cover for the systematic suppression of criticism — define the spectrum within which COVID-19 civil liberties were contested worldwide. For Bangladesh, five years after those events, the contrast remains directly relevant: a new government has replaced old repressive laws with new ones of contested quality, and the institutional habits formed during the pandemic years have not simply dissolved because legislation changed.
Germany's Constitutional Friction: How Rule of Law Worked Under Pressure
Germany's COVID-19 protest movement was a messy, sometimes alarming phenomenon. The Querdenken ("lateral thinking") movement attracted a genuine mix: libertarians, conspiracy theorists, far-right nationalists, anti-vaxxers, and ordinary citizens genuinely anxious about the scope of emergency powers. Some protesters invoked the Nazi-era Enabling Act to describe lockdown regulations. These were not people whose arguments deserved uncritical respect. But what Germany's response illustrates is a legal system that nonetheless refused to suppress them without case-by-case justification.
In April 2020, Germany's Federal Constitutional Court ruled that the initial lockdown did not justify blanket bans on outdoor assemblies. The court held that local authorities were required to assess each proposed demonstration on its merits — considering whether distancing conditions could be met, what alternatives were available — rather than invoking a categorical prohibition. Over the following months, courts repeatedly sided with protest organizers when authorities tried to impose blanket restrictions, though later in the pandemic, as infection risks worsened and court faith in organizers' compliance declined, more bans were upheld. The key word, in each case, was proportionality: emergency public health measures were legitimate when necessary and proportionate, and the judiciary had both the authority and the willingness to distinguish the two.
Germany's approach was not frictionless either. The August 2020 Berlin demonstration ended with police dispersing protesters after distancing rules were flouted and approximately 300 people were arrested — not for protesting, but for failing to comply with specific distancing conditions. The legal framework permitted protests with conditions; it did not permit their categorical elimination. As former Constitutional Court President Andreas Vosskuhle observed, vigorous public debate over the legitimacy of pandemic restrictions was itself evidence of constitutional patriotism — proof that Germans had internalized the Basic Law as a living standard, not merely a ceremonial document.
Bangladesh's Digital Security Act: Using a Pandemic to Settle Old Scores
The Digital Security Act, enacted in October 2018, gave Bangladesh's security agencies sweeping powers: the ability to arrest without a warrant on suspicion of digital offenses, to detain individuals without bail for charges under specific sections, and to criminalize expression that "tarnished the image of the state" or spread "offensive" information online — provisions whose vagueness made them available as tools against virtually any critical voice. When COVID-19 arrived, the government did not create new emergency powers to suppress dissent. It simply accelerated use of the ones it already had.
Since mid-March 2020, the authorities arrested at least a dozen people — including a doctor, opposition activists, students, and journalists — for their comments about coronavirus, most under the DSA. The Bangladesh Ministry of Information issued a circular on March 25, 2020, assigning fifteen officials to monitor each television channel for "rumours" and "propaganda" regarding COVID-19. The order was announced, then nominally withdrawn the next day — and then the monitoring was expanded to cover all media, including social media. In May 2020, a government circular banned all government employees from posting, liking, sharing, or commenting on social media content that might "tarnish the image of the state" or its "important persons." Healthcare workers were instructed not to speak to the media. In April 2020, according to the Forum for Freedom of Expression Bangladesh, nearly two dozen journalists were attacked, intimidated, harassed, or arrested specifically for reporting on corruption and mismanagement in food aid distribution during lockdown.
By July 2021, at least 433 people were imprisoned under the DSA, most on charges of publishing false or offensive information online. Those targeted included journalists, cartoonists, musicians, activists, entrepreneurs, students, and — in one documented case — a farmer who could neither read nor write. Amnesty International's analysis of 134 DSA cases at the Dhaka Cyber Tribunal between January and May 2021 found that 80 percent were filed under both Sections 25 and 29 of the Act — the broadest defamation and "offensive information" provisions. Nearly half — 97 out of 199 — were dismissed by the tribunal for lacking merit and evidence. That means for those 97 individuals, the pre-trial detention was itself the entire punishment: months of imprisonment with no conviction, no trial, and no accountability for those who filed the charges.
Mushtaq Ahmed's case became the defining symbol. Arrested in May 2020 for Facebook posts criticizing the government's COVID-19 response, he was held for 296 days without trial. UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet urged the government to conduct a transparent investigation into his death and called for an overhaul of the DSA. There were protests in Dhaka demanding justice — at which police reportedly injured 35 people and arrested 7. Rights activist Ruhul Amin was then arrested the next day for a Facebook post criticizing the government's response to Ahmed's death. The cycle of suppression was closed.
A Line of Continuity: From DSA to CSA to the Cyber Protection Ordinance 2025
Understanding Bangladesh's current civil liberties landscape requires tracing the legislative succession from the DSA through its successors. In September 2023, the Hasina government, under mounting domestic and international pressure, replaced the DSA with the Cyber Security Act — a law that critics and human rights organizations, including Amnesty International, described as functionally identical to its predecessor. Amnesty called the CSA "a replication of the draconian DSA," noting it retained the same broad provisions, the same arrest-without-warrant powers, and the same non-bailable offences. The CSA was used during the 2024 student quota-reform protests — the same movement that eventually forced Prime Minister Hasina's resignation in August 2024 — to file cases against protesters posting critical content online.
The interim government under Chief Adviser Muhammad Yunus repealed the CSA in May 2025 and introduced the Cyber Protection Ordinance, a successor law that removed nine of the most contentious provisions, including those restricting speech critical of the Liberation War, national leaders, and constitutional institutions. The ordinance was the first South Asian law to recognize internet access as a civic right and introduced judicial oversight requirements for government-ordered content removals. These were real reforms. Legal experts and human rights organizations nonetheless noted continuities: broad governmental powers to delete or obstruct digital content remained, vague language in key provisions persisted, and the consultation process — with a public feedback window of only three days in December 2024, later extended to two weeks — was criticized as inadequate. Human Rights Watch joined a coalition of organizations calling on the interim government to ensure the ordinance was truly rights-based rather than another relabeling exercise.
The Daily Star, noting Bangladesh's pattern of cycling through ICT Act → DSA → CSA → CPO, observed that the transformation "reflects a process of reactive regulation rather than true legal reform."
What the Comparison Teaches Bangladesh — and What Bangladesh Teaches the Comparison
The Germany-Bangladesh comparison is not a simple story of democratic virtue versus authoritarian vice. Germany's Querdenken movement included anti-Semitic tropes, was partially captured by far-right extremism, and produced at least one large rally in Leipzig where 90 percent of participants defied mask requirements. The constitutional protections that allowed these protests also allowed bad-faith actors to exploit them. The German Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution placed parts of the Querdenken movement under surveillance in 2021 for questioning the legitimacy of the state. Freedom of assembly protected some genuinely dangerous speech. The German system's bet was that the costs of suppression were higher than the costs of protection, and that courts, not governments, should draw the line in specific cases.
For Bangladesh, the pandemic period revealed something more structurally corrosive: that emergency conditions do not create authoritarian habits — they reveal and accelerate pre-existing ones. The DSA was enacted in 2018, well before COVID-19. The pattern of using digital speech laws against journalists, opposition figures, and critics was established before the pandemic amplified it. What the pandemic did was provide political cover — the language of public health, of combating "misinformation," of "protecting" citizens from "false rumors" — for a repression whose real purpose was protection of political power, not public safety. The WHO explicitly noted that restricting information access was not an effective public health strategy. The Bangladesh government's social media monitoring apparatus was not designed to stop people from drinking bleach; it was designed to stop people from criticizing food aid corruption.
The lesson for Bangladesh's current institutional moment is that the Cyber Protection Ordinance of 2025, whatever its formal content, is not enough. The habits and incentives that made the DSA a weapon against dissent did not originate in the DSA's text — they originated in an executive culture that viewed criticism as threat and opposition as sedition. Those habits persist after legislation changes. Bangladesh's post-2024 transition will succeed or fail not primarily on the basis of whether the CPO is marginally less repressive than the CSA, but on whether the institutions that implemented those laws — the RAB, the police, the courts that denied bail six times to a writer who would die without trial — are genuinely reformed. Civil liberties are not a legislative product. They are an institutional practice, rebuilt one case at a time.
win-tk.org is a wintk publication covering global affairs and culture for Bangladeshi and South Asian audiences.
