July Charter: The interim government’s case for an all-at-once reset

Illustration: TBS

Bangladesh is preparing to ask its citizens a deceptively simple question.

On 12 February 2026, voters will be asked to approve or reject the July Charter, a bundled package of institutional reforms intended to reset Bangladesh's political order after a decade in which elections steadily lost competition, credibility and uncertainty — until they functioned less as contests than as rituals of executive ratification.

The charter emerged from months of structured dialogue under the National Consensus Commission, chaired by the Chief Adviser, involving most major political parties and systemically important actors. 

Not everyone signed on. Some refused. Others dissented loudly. But enough of the political class agreed to put the question to the people — an agreement on process, if not on substance. 

This design choice is not incidental; it is the defining feature of the moment. An exit-bound government is openly arguing for a bundled constitutional reset, and why that is not the democratic scandal critics claim.

What the charter proposes

The July Charter is best understood not as a single reform but as a system-wide rebalancing project, explicitly grounded in the political rupture of July 2024. The charter does not treat that uprising as an aberration or law-and-order breakdown; it treats it as a constitutional signal — evidence that the existing political settlement had exhausted its legitimacy.

In doing so, the charter accords the July 2024 uprising a form of constitutional recognition. It frames the protests not merely as civic unrest but as a collective rejection of a political order in which elections had ceased to function as mechanisms of choice and institutions had been absorbed into executive command. The reforms that follow are presented as responses to that moment: an attempt to ensure that such an eruption is neither required nor repeated.

Substantively, the charter proposes reforms across the institutional spectrum. At the electoral level, it introduces a transparent, committee-based process for appointing the Election Commission, replacing executive discretion with open nominations, multi-actor vetting, and unanimous recommendations. The aim is not to guarantee neutrality — a legal impossibility — but to make capture structurally harder.

Executive dominance is addressed through constraints on tenure and role concentration. The charter introduces a 10-year cap on serving as prime minister and proposes separating the roles of party chief and head of government, weakening the fusion of party, state, and executive authority that defined the previous equilibrium.

Judicial reform occupies a central place. A Judicial Appointment Commission led by the Chief Justice would oversee appointments to the higher judiciary, reducing direct executive influence. Explicit commitments to judicial independence are paired with asset declaration requirements for judges and court staff, reflecting the Charter's insistence that autonomy and accountability must travel together.

The charter extends this logic to coercive and oversight institutions. It proposes an independent Police Commission to professionalise law enforcement and insulate it from partisan command, alongside legal reforms intended to strengthen anti-corruption oversight mechanisms. 

Most consequentially, it introduces an upper chamber of parliament elected proportionally, whose consent would be required for constitutional amendments — imposing a structural brake on unilateral constitutional rewriting by any single majority.

Taken together, these proposals are framed as institutional answers to a political verdict already delivered in the streets: that a system incapable of self-correction will eventually be corrected from outside.

How the charter is framed

While the charter addresses multiple institutional domains, the referendum offers voters no opportunity to differentiate among them. Citizens are not being asked whether they support judicial reform but oppose bicameralism, or favour election reform but worry about implementation timelines. They are being asked to accept or reject the entire architecture at once.

This "take-the-whole-package-or-leave-it" framing creates a procedural dilemma. It compresses a range of institutional preferences into a single binary choice, forcing voters to weigh trade-offs privately and express them bluntly at the ballot box.

Supporters argue that bundling is unavoidable. Institutions are interdependent; reforming one without the others risks recreating the same pathologies under new labels. An independent Election Commission without executive constraints remains vulnerable. Judicial reform without policing reform may remain symbolic. From this perspective, the charter functions less like a menu and more like a machine: removing parts compromises the whole.

Critics counter that bundling converts legitimate disagreement into rejection. A voter may broadly support reform but object to specific provisions. In such cases, a binary referendum risks producing outcomes that misrepresent public preferences — not because voters are confused, but because the instrument is blunt.

The charter attempts to mitigate this tension through sequencing. The next elected parliament would function as a reform council, tasked with implementing constitutional changes within a defined window, followed by broader institutional reforms over the government's term. 

Yet sequencing does not eliminate the core dilemma: voters must grant advance consent to a reform trajectory whose details will be contested after approval.

This is not an anomaly. Constitutional moments rarely offer precision tools. But it does mean the referendum is less an expression of detailed approval than a judgment on direction and trust.

The interim government's stance 

The interim government (IG) has taken a clear position: it supports the adoption of the July Charter and urges a "Yes" vote. Critics argue that a transitional, unelected authority should refrain from advocacy, invoking neutrality — sometimes as morality, sometimes as constitutional propriety.

This objection does not survive scrutiny.

The IG has no incentive to manipulate the referendum. It is exit-bound. It cannot extend its mandate, install a successor, or convert a "Yes" vote into political capital. Any attempt to distort the process would delegitimise the very transition it will be judged by. Manipulation offers no upside and only risk.

Advocacy, by contrast, is rational. The IG's only lasting legacy lies in whether the transition leaves behind institutional guardrails strong enough to prevent relapse. The charter is the vehicle for those guardrails. Supporting it aligns with the IG's mandate to stabilise a broken equilibrium, not to control what follows.

The neutrality argument also fails on definition. Neutral administration means equal access, equal protection, and honest counting — not enforced silence. Governments are institutional actors, not philosophical referees. They may argue for constitutional arrangements so long as they do not tilt the field.

There is ample precedent. 

During the UK's Brexit referendum, the government campaigned openly for "Remain," distributing official materials and making its position unmistakable. Whatever one thinks of the outcome, government advocacy was never seen as voiding the referendum's legitimacy. The democratic failure — if there was one — lay in what followed, not in the fact that the government took a side.

Nor does law rescue the objection here. No credible constitutional doctrine requires an interim authority to remain mute in a referendum, provided it does not coerce, censor or disadvantage opponents. Absent such abuse, appeals to "caretaker propriety" are a preference masquerading as legality.

The real discomfort is political. Many actors dislike parts of the charter, lack leverage to amend it, and fear that a "Yes" vote would lock in constraints they cannot later undo. Unable to defeat the substance, they attack the messenger.

The legitimacy of the referendum does not depend on whether the interim government has an opinion. It depends on whether citizens are free to reject it. If voters can say "No" without fear or penalty, advocacy is not manipulation — it is honesty. The democratic offence would not be that the IG spoke, but that it pretended it had nothing at stake.