The Supreme Court of the United Kingdom has allowed Chowdhury Mueen-Uddin, a Bangladeshi condemned war crimes convict living in London for decades, to revive his libel action against the British home secretary.
The court of the reversed the decision of the lower courts to reject the claim as an abuse of process and confirmed that Mueen-Uddin should be permitted to pursue his claim at trial, according to the judgement posted on the UK Supreme Court website.
Mueen-Uddin鈥檚 claim relates to a 2019 British Home Office publication of allegations of complicity in war crimes and crimes against humanity during the Bangladesh war of independence.
Mueen-Uddin has been living in the United Kingdom since 1973 and been a UK citizen since 1984, according to the judgement.
Shortly after the independence of Bangladesh, Mueen, who was been a leader of Al-Badr Bahini, fled to the United Kingdom and assumed a leadership role within the Muslim community in Britain.
The International Crimes Tribunal of Bangladesh in 2013 convicted Mueen-Uddin in his absence of abduction, torture and murder of nine Dhaka University teachers, six journalists and three doctors during the war. The tribunal also sentenced him to death.
He has not, however, been deported from the British capital as Bangladesh has no extradition agreement with the United Kingdom.
Six years after the ICT conviction, in 2019 the UK Home Office published a report prepared by the Commission for Countering Extremism, a non-statutory committee of the Home Office, entitled 鈥楥hallenging Hateful Extremism鈥�.
As well as being circulated in hard copy, the report was uploaded on the Home Office website.
As the UK High Court found, the report referred to Mueen-Uddin in terms that readers would have understood to mean that he was one of those responsible for, and had committed, war crimes during the 1971 war.
Following Mueen-Uddin鈥檚 initial letter of complaint sent in December 2019, the Home Office refused to apologise or agree to his other demands for redress, instead limiting its response to removing the offending words from the online version of the report.
Mueen-Uddin then sued for libel and the home secretary applied to the court to strike out his claim, asserting that it was an abuse of process.