The Case That Tamed Parliament: Anwar Hossain Chowdhury v Bangladesh (1989)

01st Aug 2026, author: admin

The case at a glance

Anwar Hossain Chowdhury v Bangladesh, 1989 BLD (Spl) 1; 41 DLR (AD) 165 (Appellate Division). Also known as the Eighth Amendment case. Holding: Parliament’s power to amend the Constitution under Article 142 does not extend to destroying its basic structure.

The story

The Constitution (Eighth Amendment) Act 1988 amended Article 100 to establish six permanent Benches of the High Court Division outside Dhaka, each exercising the Division’s jurisdiction over a defined territory. Presented as decentralisation — bringing justice closer to litigants — the amendment in substance carved the High Court Division into seven territorial fragments. Advocates challenged it, arguing that a single, plenary High Court Division is part of the constitutional architecture itself.

The question

Is the amending power of Parliament unlimited? Or are there features of the Constitution so fundamental that even a constitutional amendment cannot touch them?

The decision

By majority, the Appellate Division struck the amendment down — the first time in the country’s history that a constitutional amendment was judicially annulled. Drawing on the Indian Supreme Court’s reasoning in Kesavananda Bharati v State of Kerala (1973), the Court held that the Constitution stands on certain structural pillars — among them the supremacy of the Constitution, and the unitary and indivisible character of the Supreme Court with its plenary High Court Division — and that Article 142 permits amendment of the Constitution, not its destruction. A power to amend is not a power to abrogate.

Why it still matters

Every subsequent challenge to a constitutional amendment in Bangladesh — and every seminar-room argument about the limits of parliamentary sovereignty — begins with this case. It settled that in Bangladesh the Constitution, not Parliament, is supreme, and that the courts will enforce that supremacy even against the amending power itself. Few judgments anywhere have drawn the boundary between constitutional politics and constitutional law so decisively.

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