Do we like Sheikh Hasina?
Our score: 1 out of 10. A death sentence in absentia over the 2024 crackdown, and no apology, outweigh a UN climate award and development claims, though the trial's fairness is disputed.
Hasina ran Bangladesh for 15 years until a student-led uprising ended her rule in August 2024 and she fled to India. Her Awami League party has since been outlawed. At the UN in 2019 she told the General Assembly that Bangladesh was often called a “development miracle”, and cited fast growth and poverty reduction. Those are her claims as reported, not an independent audit.
The big story is the 2024 crackdown. In November 2025 a Dhaka tribunal convicted her in absentia on three counts: incitement, an order to kill, and failing to prevent atrocities. She was sentenced to death. The UN estimates up to 1,400 people were killed, and it also raised concerns about the trial's fairness because she was tried in her absence. She called it a “rigged tribunal”.
On the harm check, the record is heavy. Human Rights Watch reported in January 2025 that officers told its researchers she directly ordered some enforced disappearances and killings, an allegation the page carries no response to. In July 2025 the same tribunal sentenced her for contempt over a recording, which a government forensic report found authentic, in which she was allegedly heard claiming a licence to kill. In interviews she accepts that mistakes were made by some security forces but denies authorising fire on crowds. Nothing on LGBTQ+ rights turned up in the sources I read, so that is a gap, not a pass.
The corruption cases follow the same pattern: convictions in absentia that she and her allies reject. In December 2025 a Dhaka court gave her five years in a Purbachal plot-allocation case, her sister seven, and cancelled a plot. The page carries no response from her, and the cases came under the interim government that replaced her. Treat them as real but politically charged.
The latest chapter is her vow to come home. In January 2026 she used an audio message to say democracy was “in exile” and that the February vote would not be free or fair. In August she said she may be detained but must return, and called the 2024 uprising a coordinated campaign to topple her. Uprising leaders say she must face the courts, and Dhaka calls her a convicted mass murderer.
There is some good on the ledger. In 2015 the UN Environment Programme gave her its Champions of the Earth award, in the policy leadership category, for Bangladesh's climate initiatives, including a national climate fund paid for with its own money. She also told the UN that Bangladesh was carrying the burden of the Rohingya crisis. That is real, but it was earned on the same watch the tribunal and the UN are now examining.