ARTICLE TEXT

Read the Constitution of Bangladesh as it stood in 1972 and you will not find the word environment. The framers, writing in the aftermath of war, were concerned with the state, its organs and the rights of citizens. Yet today Bangladesh has one of the most developed bodies of constitutional environmental law in South Asia. How did that happen? The answer lies in judicial interpretation, public interest litigation and, eventually, a constitutional amendment.

The Foundation: Right to Life

Article 32 guarantees that no person shall be deprived of life or personal liberty save in accordance with law, and Article 31 promises the protection of the law. In the mid-1990s the Bangladesh Environmental Lawyers Association (BELA), led by Dr Mohiuddin Farooque, asked the High Court Division to read these provisions broadly. In the radioactive milk case of 1996, concerning imported milk powder contaminated after the Chernobyl disaster, the court held that the right to life includes the protection of health and normal longevity. Life, in other words, means more than bare survival.

The following year, in the FAP-20 case, the Appellate Division opened the doors of the court to public interest litigants. Anyone who takes up a public cause affecting an indeterminate number of people, the court held, is a person aggrieved under Article 102. The two decisions together created the machinery of environmental constitutionalism: a substantive right, and a way to enforce it.

Building the Body of Law

Over the next two decades, the High Court Division used that machinery repeatedly. It ordered the phasing out of two-stroke vehicles in Dhaka, directed action against industrial pollution of rivers, intervened in ship-breaking on the Chittagong coast, and protected wetlands and hills from illegal filling and cutting. In many cases, the court did not merely declare rights but issued continuing directions and monitored compliance, a form of supervision borrowed from Indian public interest litigation.

The Constitution itself caught up in 2011. The Fifteenth Amendment inserted Article 18A, which provides that the state shall endeavour to protect and improve the environment and to preserve natural resources, biodiversity, wetlands, forests and wildlife for present and future citizens. Article 18A sits among the fundamental principles of state policy, so under Article 8(2) it is not enforceable by any court. Its practical value is interpretive: it confirms that environmental protection is a constitutional value, and it strengthens the argument that Article 32 must be read in its light.

The Turag Judgment

The most striking development came in 2019. In a writ petition brought by Human Rights and Peace for Bangladesh about encroachment on the Turag river, the High Court Division, in a judgment delivered by Justice Moyeenul Islam Chowdhury and Justice Md Ashraful Kamal, declared the Turag a legal person, or living entity, and extended that status to all rivers in the country. It appointed the National River Conservation Commission as the rivers’ legal guardian and issued a long list of directions on eviction of encroachers, pollution and public awareness.

The judgment drew on similar decisions in New Zealand, India and Colombia, and it attracted international attention. In February 2020 the Appellate Division disposed of the government’s petition for leave to appeal. It left the core of the judgment standing, including the eviction directives, but set aside some of the wider directions, such as those purporting to declare the precautionary and polluter-pays principles as binding law and those addressed to the Bangladesh Bank and the Election Commission. The rivers remain legal persons; the outer edges of the judgment were trimmed.

Where Next?

Two questions remain open. The first is enforcement. A river with legal personality still needs someone to act for it, funds to do so, and officials willing to evict powerful encroachers. Reports on the state of the Turag and the Buriganga suggest that legal status has not yet translated into clean water.

The second is constitutional design. The Constitution Reform Commission has argued for a judicially enforceable right to a healthy environment, moving environmental protection out of the unenforceable principles of state policy and into the fundamental rights. That would put Bangladesh alongside more than a hundred countries whose constitutions now recognise such a right expressly. It would also relieve the courts of the need to stretch Article 32 further.

Conclusion

The story of the green Constitution is a story about interpretation. A document that never mentioned the environment now protects rivers, air and forests because judges, lawyers and litigants were willing to read the right to life as a right to a life worth living. The task for the next generation of lawyers is to turn that principle into practice, and perhaps to write it into the text at last.

Sources

1. Dr Mohiuddin Farooque v Bangladesh (radioactive milk case), 48 DLR (HCD) 438, summary: https://www.globalhealthrights.org/dr-mohiuddin-farooque-v-government-of-bangladesh-radioactive-milk-case/
2. Constitution of Bangladesh, Article 18A: http://bdlaws.minlaw.gov.bd/act-367/section-41505.html
3. Dhaka Tribune, Turag given legal person status (2019): https://www.dhakatribune.com/bangladesh/court/167534/turag-given-%E2%80%98legal-person%E2%80%99-status-to-save-it-from
4. Appellate Division order of 17 February 2020 (Turag), Queen Mary University of London: https://www.qmul.ac.uk/decentering-human/media/law/docs/research/River-Turag—-Bangladesh-Suprem-Court—2020.pdf
5. The Daily Star, Recognising a judicially enforceable right to environment (1 March 2026): https://www.thedailystar.net/law-our-rights/news/recognising-judicially-enforceable-right-environment-4098601