Nobel laureate Yunus faces jail in Bangladesh court ruling

Muhammad Yunus, a Bangladeshi Nobel Peace winner, was expected to spend six months in prison when a labour law case that his supporters claimed was politically motivated was heard by a court on Monday.

With his innovative microfinance bank, Yunus, 83, is credited with helping millions of people escape poverty. However, longstanding prime minister Sheikh Hasina has taken a dislike to him, accusing him of “sucking blood” from the underprivileged.

Previously viewed as a political competitor, Hasina has launched a barrage of vicious verbal assaults against the widely recognised 2006 Nobel Peace Prize recipient.

Following a boycott by the opposition, she is almost guaranteed to win a fifth term in next week’s national elections.

Yunus, an economist, and his three coworkers from Grameen Telecom, a company he created, are charged with breaking labour regulations because they neglected to establish a fund for the welfare of employees.

All four refute the accusations.

Attorneys reported that a labour court in the nation’s capital, Dhaka, had scheduled the decision for Monday afternoon.

“We proved that Professor Muhammad Yunus and others have violated the mandatory requirements of the labour laws,” Khurshid Alam Khan, the lead prosecutor, told AFP ahead of the verdict.

He said Yunus could be sentenced to up to six months in prison if convicted.

“We hope the court will hand down the highest punishment,” he said.

Yunus is facing more than 100 other charges over labour law violations and alleged graft.

Yunus told reporters after one of the hearings last month that he had not profited from any of the more than 50 social business firms he had set up in Bangladesh.

“They were not for my personal benefit,” Yunus said.

One of his lawyers, Khaja Tanvir, told AFP the case was “meritless, false and ill-motivated”.

“The sole aim of the case is to harass and humiliate him in front of the world,” he said.

In August, 160 global figures, including former US president Barack Obama and ex-UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon, published a joint letter denouncing “continuous judicial harassment” of Yunus.

The signatories, including more than 100 of his fellow Nobel laureates, said they feared for “his safety and freedom”.

Critics accuse Bangladeshi courts of rubber-stamping decisions made by Hasina’s government.

Her administration has been increasingly firm in its crackdown on political dissent, and Yunus’s popularity among the Bangladeshi public has for years earmarked him as a potential rival.

Amnesty International accused the government of “weaponizing labour laws” when Yunus went to trial in September and called for an immediate end to his “harassment”.

Criminal proceedings against Yunus were “a form of political retaliation for his work and dissent”, it said.