Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus convicted in Bangladesh labour law case | Courts News

Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus has been convicted of violating Bangladesh’s labour authorized tips in a case decried by his supporters as politically motivated.

“Professor Yunus and three of his Grameen Telecom colleagues had been convicted under labour authorized tips and sentenced to six months in straightforward imprisonment,” lead prosecutor Khurshid Alam Khan instructed the AFP info firm on Monday.

He added that every one 4 had been immediately granted bail pending appeals.

Yunus, 83, is credited with lifting a whole bunch of 1000’s out of poverty collectively along with his pioneering microfinance monetary establishment nevertheless has earned the enmity of longtime Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, who has accused him of “sucking blood” from the poor.

Hasina has made a variety of scathing verbal assaults in the direction of the internationally revered 2006 Nobel Peace Prize winner, who was as quickly as seen as a political rival.

Yunus and three colleagues from Grameen Telecom, certainly one of many companies he based mostly, had been accused of violating labour authorized tips after they didn’t create a workers’ welfare fund inside the agency.

All 4 deny the prices.

“This verdict is unprecedented,” Abdullah Al Mamun, a lawyer for Yunus, instructed AFP. “We didn’t get justice.”

Yunus is coping with higher than 100 completely different costs over labour laws violations and alleged corruption.

He instructed reporters after certainly one of many hearings closing month that he had not profited from any of the higher than 50 social enterprise companies he had prepare in Bangladesh.

“They weren’t for my personal revenue,” Yunus acknowledged.

One different of his authorized professionals, Khaja Tanvir, instructed AFP that the case was “meritless, false and ill-motivated”.

“The one actual purpose of the case is to harass and humiliate him in entrance of the world,” he acknowledged.

‘Travesty of justice’

Irene Khan, former chief of Amnesty Worldwide now working as a United Nations specific rapporteur who was present at Monday’s verdict, instructed AFP the conviction was “a travesty of justice”.

“A social activist and Nobel laureate who launched honour and pleasure to the nation is being persecuted on frivolous grounds,” she acknowledged.

In August, 160 worldwide figures, along with former US President Barack Obama and ex-UN Secretary-Regular Ban Ki-moon, published a joint letter denouncing the “regular judicial harassment” of Yunus.

The signatories, along with higher than 100 of his fellow Nobel laureates, acknowledged they feared for “his safety and freedom”.

Critics accuse Bangladeshi courts of rubber-stamping alternatives made by Hasina’s authorities, which is all nevertheless positive to win one different time interval in vitality subsequent week at elections boycotted by the opposition.

Her administration has been an increasing number of company in its crackdown on political dissent, and Yunus’s repute among the many many Bangladeshi public has for years earmarked him as a doable rival.

Amnesty accused the federal authorities of “weaponising labour authorized tips” when Yunus went to trial in September and often called for an instantaneous end to his “harassment”.

Authorized proceedings in the direction of Yunus had been “a sort of political retaliation for his work and dissent”, it acknowledged.