Article 7B and the Paradox of Eternalising the Constitution of Bangladesh

Lima Aktar

Jahangirnagar University

Can an amendment, which is brought to declare the unamendability of certain parts of the constitution, be itself found to violate the principle of constitutional amendability? This curious case has occurred in Bangladesh, where an amendment (The Fifteenth Amendment) has been passed in 2011 to introduce an eternity clause, namely Article 7B. This Article entrenches a substantial number of provisions including the Preamble, Part I (The Nature of the Republic), Part II (Fundamental Principles of State Policy) and Part III (Fundamental Right) of the Constitution as well as the provisions relating to what has already been established as the ‘basic structure’ of the Constitution, such as independence of the judiciary, separation of powers, rule of law etc. Two important concerns flow from this Article: firstly, it preserves certain parts of the Constitution from amendability, but interestingly this Article itself was introduced by an exercise of simple amending power, as opposed to an exercise of constituent power. Secondly, it has entrenched a significant part of the Constitution, without due regard to the distinction between a fundamental provision from a clearly non-fundamental one. In this post, I focus on these two issues to examine whether and how they can potentially question the very constitutionality of Article 7B—the entrenching provision, which, as I argue, becomes the ‘black hole’ of the Bangladesh Constitution. 

1. Can Constitutional Entrenchment be Done by Amending Power?  

The practice shows that unamendable provisions or an eternity clause is inserted at the time of constitution making or in the moment when a new constitution comes to replace the earlier, as found in the case of Germany, Turkey, Tunisia, and Nepal, among others. Such practice signifies that constitutional entrenchment is made by the exercise of constituent power. So, the question of whether a constitution can be entrenched by the amending power depends on another question: is amending power a constituent power, and if so, is such power nonetheless limited? There has been a long-standing debate on this issue. For example, in the case of Sankari Prasad v. Union of India (1951), the Court, while differentiating between the legislative and constituent power, argued that the power of amending a constitution is not an ordinary legislative power but an exercise of constituent power. It therefore declares the amending power to be “absolute.” By contrast, in the case of Kesavananda Bharati v State of Kerala, the Supreme Court of India accepted that amending power is constituent power but argues that this power to amend the constitution is not unlimited. It is interesting to note that some scholars even categorized the amending power as a third category that falls between the constituent and constituted power, the first characterized by Emmanuel Abbé Sieyès, as an extraordinary, superior, and extra-legal power with no confines, while the latter as the ordinary, inferior and legal powers which are essentially limited. Yaniv Roznai’s argument is worth mentioning: he postulated that the power of amendability is neither constituent nor constituted, rather a third category which is sui generis in nature representing a grey area reflecting features of both. He describes this sui generis nature of amending power by situating it in secondary constituent power, which according to him is different from the primary constituent power. As he claims, the primary constituent power may be unlimited and beyond any inherent constraints on it while the amending power is categorized as secondary constituent power that is always subject to limitations. But, I would suggest that Roznai’s argument has not been reflected  in the Indian context, as the Court, in the Kesavananda case “decides to protect the fundamental principles of the constitution from the ordinary institutions of government, even if their alteration would require an exercise of constituent power not authorized by the constitutional regime” (Joel Colón-Ríos). The Kesavananda decision therefore domesticates constituent power by appealing to the inherent constraints on the category of constituent power as whole. In this formulation, there is no recognition of extra-legal constituent power as can be found in Roznai’s idea of “primary constituent power”. 

However, the Supreme Court of Bangladesh has made a departure from Kesavananda, in establishing the principle of limited amending power in The Eight Amendment Case. In this case, it was argued by the Attorney General that “the amending power is a constituent power, it is not a legislative power and therefore the Parliament has unlimited power to amend the constitution invoking its constituent power.” Rejecting such argument, the Court has firmly established that the parliament’s amending power is ‘derivative not constituent,’ hence, the parliament cannot amend the constitution by violating such fundamental features of the Constitution. To describe the nature of amending power, Justice Shahabuddin Ahmed used the term “derivative constituent power,” which seems to fit into Roznai’s thesis of secondary constituent power. He however observes that “[p]eople after making a Constitution give the Parliament power to amend it in exercising its legislative power strictly following certain special procedures”. Given this principle established by the Supreme Court, it can be argued that Article 7B was adopted by the exercise of “legislative power” or, at best, by derivative constituent power. From this perspective, the eternity clause of the Bangladesh Constitution cannot be said to be adopted in the exercise of primary constituent power. This fact triggers the question as to how an amendment, which is not an exercise of primary constituent power, can incorporate eternity clauses which are generally made at the time of constitution-making, i.e. the ultimate exercise of primary constituent power? This paradoxical feature of Article 7B has been rightly identified in the following way by Kawser Ahmed: “[i]ronically, Article 7B (could now be termed ‘the clogger clause’) itself being a constitutional amendment that seeks to shut the door to subsequent amendments despite the fact that it fails to make any ostensible claim to the superiority over other amendments in any respect”. 

2. What to Entrench and What Not to Entrench: Are All the Provisions Equal? 

 Focusing on the importance of certain constitutional principles, Carl Schmitt argued for delimiting the amending power of the Reichstag. But he suggested that the unamendable part of the constitution could not be listed in the constitution. The 1949 Basic Law, however, gave special status to some provisions by listing them as immutable. In doing so, it however maintains the Schmittian suggestion that, although the fundamentality of the state and constitution remained immutable, certainly not all the provisions can be called fundamental and listed as unamendable. In Bangladesh, Article 7B has entrenched a large number of provisions which makes it stand at its odds on the promise of entrenchment as depicted in the German constitutional tradition. 

The implication of this is that it does not differentiate between the values attached to the various provisions. To put it differently, Article 7B neglects the fact that not all the articles entrenched by it may qualify to be the core ideals of the constitution. To take an example, Article 16 states that the state shall adopt effective measures for rural developments and agricultural revolution and Article 17 also mentions the same for facilitating free and compulsory education. However, these obligations of the state can be relinquished at any moment after achieving certain goals. In contrast, some basic ideals of the constitutions are so fundamental and they embody a continuous process that the state shall always strive to protect and promote. Such ideals include the republican nature of the state (Art. 1), the separation of the judiciary from the executive (Art. 22), provisions of non-discrimination (Art. 27-29), and so on. It indicates that Article 7B has incorporated a wide range of articles without calculating the degree of value attached to each article. 

Thus, questions may arise as to how this Article that eternalises a massive part of the constitution, can withstand the test of limited exercise of amending power. In Minerva Mills Ltd v Union of India (1980), the Court stated that “… indeed, a limited amending power itself is one of the basic features of our constitution and therefore, the limitations on that power cannot be destroyed.” Thus, it can be said that Article 7B was never an exercise of limited amending power — it rather becomes “the black hole of the constitution” , in the sense that nothing can escape from its invisible force. The aporia of this article lies in the fact that, in the name of limiting the amending power it itself exceeds the limit of its own authority. It is this aporia — the invisible force of Article 7B that presents a challenge to this provision which itself contradicts the limited nature of amending power. Thus, it is the question of its own constitutionality that Article 7B overlooks, being founded on more political reasons rather than constitutional reasons as argued by Ridwanul Hoque. 

Lima Aktar is an LLM (research) student at Jahangirnagar University, Bangladesh 

Suggested Citation: Lima Aktar, ‘Article 7B and the Paradox of Eternalising the Constitution of Bangladesh’ IACL-AIDC Blog (11 May 2021) https://blog-iacl-aidc.org/2021-posts/article-7b-and-the-paradox-of-eternalising-the-constitution-of-banglades