ARTICLE TEXT

Few lawyers anywhere can say that they wrote their country’s constitution and then spent fifty years defending it in court. Dr Kamal Hossain can. Born in Calcutta on 20 April 1937 and educated in Dhaka and Oxford, he was thirty-five when he chaired the committee that produced the Constitution of the People’s Republic of Bangladesh. He has been the country’s leading constitutional advocate ever since.

Early Life and Education

Hossain attended St Gregory’s High School in Dhaka before going to the United States, where he took a degree in economics at the University of Notre Dame in 1955. He then went to Oxford, reading jurisprudence at the undergraduate level, taking the Bachelor of Civil Law in 1958, and completing a doctorate in international law in 1964 on state sovereignty and the United Nations Charter. He was called to the Bar by Lincoln’s Inn in 1959 and enrolled as an advocate of the Dhaka High Court in the same year.

His early practice was as a junior to Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy, the former Prime Minister of Pakistan, at the firm of Orr, Dignam and Co. That connection drew him into the politics of East Pakistan. He served on the defence team for Sheikh Mujibur Rahman in the Agartala Conspiracy Case of 1968, and by 1971 he was one of Mujib’s closest legal advisers.

1971 and the Constitution

When the Pakistan army launched its crackdown in March 1971, Hossain was arrested and held in Haripur jail in West Pakistan for the duration of the war. He was released with Sheikh Mujib in late December 1971 and returned to a new country.

Appointed Law Minister, he chaired the thirty-four-member Constitution Drafting Committee from April 1972. The committee worked with remarkable speed. Its draft, placed before the Constituent Assembly in October, was adopted on 4 November 1972 and came into force on 16 December. The document reflected Hossain’s own commitments: a parliamentary democracy, an independent judiciary with the power of judicial review, a bill of enforceable fundamental rights, and the four principles of nationalism, socialism, democracy and secularism. Much of it survives, and much of what was later removed has been restored by the courts.

Minister and Diplomat

Hossain served as Foreign Minister from 1973 to 1975, leading Bangladesh into the United Nations in 1974, and as Minister of Petroleum and Minerals, where he established Petrobangla and drafted the legislation that still governs the country’s oil and gas sector. He was abroad when Sheikh Mujib was assassinated in August 1975, and he did not return to office.

In 1981 he stood as the Awami League’s candidate for President and lost to Abdus Sattar. He left the party in the early 1990s and founded Gano Forum, which he led for three decades. He retired from active politics in October 2023 and was made the party’s emeritus president.

The Advocate

It is as a lawyer, however, that his influence has been greatest. He appeared in many of the cases that define Bangladeshi constitutional law and served as President of the Supreme Court Bar Association in 1990 and 1991. With Barrister Syed Ishtiaq Ahmed, he devised the caretaker government formula that ended the political crisis of 1996. He founded and chaired the Bangladesh Legal Aid and Services Trust, whose litigation on arrest, remand and the death penalty appears throughout the Landmark Cases series on this site.

His international career was equally distinguished. He served as the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Afghanistan from 1998 to 2003, sat on the United Nations Compensation Commission, was a member of the Iran–United States Claims Tribunal, and sat as an ad hoc judge of the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea in the Malaysia v Singapore land reclamation case in 2003. He has been a Vice-Chairman of the International Law Association and is on the panel of arbitrators of the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes.

Writings

His book Law and Policy in Petroleum Development (1979) remains a reference on the legal framework of natural resource development in developing countries. His memoir, Bangladesh: Quest for Freedom and Justice, published by Oxford University Press in 2013, is the most important first-hand account of the making of the Constitution.

Why He Matters

Hossain’s career spans the entire history of Bangladeshi law. He drafted the Constitution, argued for it when it was under attack, and built institutions, from BLAST to Gano Forum, to defend the rights it guarantees. Not everyone has agreed with his politics; his party never won more than a handful of seats. But his standing as a lawyer has never been in doubt. In early 2026, at the age of eighty-eight, he was admitted to hospital in Dhaka, and the news drew expressions of concern from across the political spectrum. For the generation of lawyers now studying the Constitution, his name is on its first page.

Sources

1. United Nations Audiovisual Library of International Law, biography of Kamal Hossain: https://legal.un.org/avl/pdf/ls/Hossain_bio.pdf
2. Wikipedia, Kamal Hossain: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamal_Hossain
3. Dhaka Tribune, Dr Kamal Hossain: the elder statesman’s farewell (October 2023): https://www.dhakatribune.com/bangladesh/329245/dr-kamal-hossain-the-elder-statesman%E2%80%99s-farewell
4. BSS, report on Dr Kamal Hossain’s hospitalisation (January 2026): https://www.bssnews.net/news/347504