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Surendra Kumar Sinha was the head of the Supreme Court in 2017 when parliament ruled that he could not remove the judge from office, a move applauded by lawyers.
The former Bangladeshi chief justice has been sentenced in absentia to 11 years in prison on corruption charges in a case in which opposition groups and supporters say he has a political reason.
Surendra Kumar Sinha, 70, was the head of the Supreme Court in 2017 when parliament decided it could not remove the judge because the lawyers guaranteed judicial independence.
Sinha left Bangladesh in late 2017 on the grounds that he had to leave after a landmark decision. He lives in North America and has applied for asylum there.
Campaigners have said his departure has been a huge blow to the credibility of the country’s judiciary, and have accused the government of pursuing Sinha.
“It was very obvious that the government was angry with him and … his decision to simply kill his reputation,” Asif Nazrul, a law professor at the University of Dhaka, told AFP news agency.
A court in the capital Dhaka has found Sinha guilty of approximately $ 471,000 in conjunction with officials of a private bank.
Ten more people were prosecuted in the case, eight of whom have been tried and several have been sentenced, according to reports.
Judge Shaikh Nazmul Alam of the Dhaka Special Court of Justice handed down his sentence on Tuesday and sentenced Sinha to seven years in prison for money laundering and four years of breach of trust, prosecutor Khurshid Alam Khan said.
“This ruling proved that no one in the country is above the law. Those who have done wrong will bring anyone to trial, ”he told AFP.
Sinha was the first Hindu judge of an officially secular Muslim majority of 169 million Muslims.
He later wrote a book, A Broken Dream: A Rule of Law, Human Rights and Democracy, in which he said he had to resign and flee after being threatened by a military security agency.
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