On the evening of April 17 this year, police came to A.M. Hasan Nasim’s home in Dhaka and took him away. His offence was a cartoon. It showed a government MP and quoted a joke the man had himself cracked on the floor of parliament, a joke already printed in the newspapers. A ruling-party activist filed a complaint. The case was booked under the online blackmail section of the brand-new cyber law.The Daily Star asked the obvious question in an editorial: How does a public joke, reported in the press and turned into a cartoon, become blackmail? Nasim got bail four days later, after students marched at Dhaka University with a banner that read, roughly, “Speech will go on, the pen will go on.”No one expects a conviction, and no one needs one. Spending four nights in jail is the real punishment. That sums up how the whole system works.The law changed, but the old habits stayed the sameIt’s important to see just how much effort Bangladesh has put into fixing this problem, because that effort makes the failure even clearer.Section 57 of the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Act, 2006, was abused, so it was replaced by the Digital Security Act (DSA) in 2018. The DSA became a byword for repression, so in 2023 it was replaced by the Cyber Security Act, which Amnesty found had inherited 58 of its 59 provisions. The interim government scrapped the CSA in turn and issued the Cyber Security Ordinance in May 2025, stripping out the clauses that had been used to harass people.Parliament adopted that ordinance almost verbatim this year as the Cyber Surokkha Act, 2026 (rendered in English variously as the Cyber Protection or Cyber Safety Act). One of the people who helped draft it, Azaher Uddin Anik, has written that the new law does not criminalise defamation or falsehood at all, and only allows the aggrieved person themselves to file a complaint.Yet within four months of the new government taking office, he found himself watching cases filed by third parties, on behalf of ministers who then disowned them, against people who had done nothing the Act forbids.Also read: Bangladesh’s 2024 Uprising Changed the Players, Not the RulesWhen the cyber law wouldn’t stretch, the police simply reached for something else. Section 54 of the Criminal Procedure Code, the colonial catch-all that lets an officer arrest on suspicion, and which the high court in BLAST v Bangladesh tried to fence in more than two decades ago. And above all the Anti-Terrorism Act, 2009, which the interim government amended in May 2025 to ban the activities of the Awami League and which has since become a general-purpose speech law.Journalist Anis Alamgir was remanded under it in December for what a complainant described as using social media and talk shows to support the League. Sheikh Tasnim Afroze Imi, a former student union vice-president, was jailed under it in March for playing a recording of Sheikh Mujib’s 1971 speech.On April 2, according to Human Rights Watch, members of Jubo Dal abducted a man named Shaon Mahmud, handed him to the police at Sreenagar, and he was booked under the ATA for insulting the prime minister on Facebook. Netra News counted at least ten arrests over Facebook content in March and April alone.Human Rights Watch summed it up: Abuses in the security sector are now deeply rooted, and the police have just shifted their loyalty to new leaders. That’s the real issue. Three governments, three cyber laws, but the same reaction every time.What is actually going onIf you look past the case numbers, three things are happening at the same time.First, the arrest itself is the punishment. Everyone knows the charges won’t hold up but that’s not the point. What matters is spending a night at the police station, being photographed in handcuffs and having your family rush to find a lawyer.Filing a complaint is easy and free, so there’s no reason not to do it. As long as a local party activist can get someone arrested with a phone call, those calls will keep coming.Second, the state relies on just one solution: prison. Bangladesh has 75 prisons built for 45,186 people, but in August they held 98,233—more than double their capacity, and a crisis the home minister himself admitted to in parliament in June. About three out of four inmates haven’t been convicted of anything.Dhaka Central Jail has only two doctors for nearly 14,000 inmates. Anyone arrested for a rude post ends up in the same overcrowded wards where money can buy a better place to sleep. There are no warnings, no alternatives and no community service options in regular use. Whether a magistrate faces a young person who posted something rude or an armed robber, the choices are the same: remand or release.Third, sometimes the provocation is intentional and it is having an effect. Not every post is just an emotional outburst. Some young people in opposition parties have realised that the best way to make a political statement is to insult a leader enough to get arrested.Also read: The Revolution in Bangladesh Ate Its Reporters: A Personal AccountEach arrest leads to rallies, banners, statements from Human Rights Watch and editorials. In a way, the government is helping the opposition’s campaign and paying the price for it.Even though the ruling party won 209 out of 297 seats with a 60% turnout in an election praised as credible, it acts as if it has something to fear. Hasina’s ministers made the same claims about “anti-state” posts but it didn’t protect her.Rude is not the same as criminalLet’s be honest about the cultural side, because it matters and shouldn’t be ignored. In our society, insulting elders or leaders is considered shameful. You might get scolded by your mother or lectured by your uncle. Many of the posts about the prime minister and his family are offensive, and no one is saying they are admirable. Some officials even argue that abusive language isn’t really “expression” and doesn’t deserve protection.But calling something shameful and calling it terrorism are not the same thing. They are completely different issues. Article 39 of our constitution protects freedom of speech, with reasonable limits, and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which Bangladesh joined in 2000, does the same.The UN Human Rights Committee’s General Comment 34 makes three points the government should pay attention to: public figures can be criticised and opposed; punishing someone just for criticising the government is never a necessary restriction; and jail is never the right penalty for defamation.Insult laws are the weakest kind of speech restriction because, unlike defamation, they don’t even require a false statement. They just protect feelings, and the state shouldn’t be in the business of protecting the feelings of the powerful.Criminal law does have a role online. Threats of violence, incitement, sharing someone’s address so they can be targeted, sexual harassment of women in public life, and organised disinformation campaigns are all crimes because they harm real people. The new law already covers most of these. But a cartoon of a chief whip or a teenager insulting the prime minister doesn’t belong on that list.What the rest of the world found outBangladesh doesn’t need to come up with something new. Other countries tried these approaches decades ago and recorded what worked.The UN’s Standard Minimum Rules for Non-custodial Measures, the Tokyo Rules, were adopted by the General Assembly in 1990. They ask states to build non-custodial options into their systems specifically to reduce imprisonment, to deal with offenders in the community while avoiding formal court proceedings wherever possible, to apply the principle of minimum intervention, and to protect the dignity of the offender at all times. That last point matters for what follows.The Netherlands introduced community service in 1981 precisely to replace short prison terms, and the number of orders climbed from 213 that year to over 12,000 by 1995. It has been studied to death. A 2010 study by Hilde Wermink and colleagues matched 4,246 Dutch offenders who got community service against comparable ones who went to prison, and found that those who did community service reoffended significantly less, in both the short and the long term, with the result holding up under tests for hidden bias.A 2023 follow-up from Leiden University put a number on it: someone given a prison sentence of up to six months was 17% more likely to reoffend within a year than someone given a community sentence for the same kind of offence, and the researchers estimated that retribution for its own sake was costing Dutch society around 400 million euros a year.Britain reached the same conclusion from its own data. The Ministry of Justice’s 2019 analysis found that short custodial sentences of under twelve months were followed by higher one-year reoffending than community orders or suspended sentences would have been, by about four percentage points.Also read: Unrealistic Expectations, Broken Promises: The Aftermath of the 2024 Uprising in BangladeshThe Gauke sentencing review picked this up, and in March this year England and Wales brought into force a law that presumes any sentence of twelve months or less should be suspended unless the circumstances are exceptional. A country with prisons far better resourced than ours has just decided, on the evidence, that short jail terms are a bad deal.For a country closer to our own conditions, look at Africa. Zimbabwe launched a community service scheme in 1992 as a direct response to prison overcrowding, and it worked well enough that an international conference at Kadoma in 1997 produced the Kadoma Declaration on Community Service, which the UN Economic and Social Council annexed to a resolution the following year and commended to countries with crowded prisons and thin budgets.Kenya followed with its Community Service Orders Act in 1998, and Kenyan courts today routinely cite the Tokyo Rules when diverting people from custody. These are not rich-country luxuries. They were built for exactly our situation.Two other tools deserve a mention. Finland has used income-scaled “day fines” since 1921 and Germany since 1975: the fine is a number of days multiplied by what the person earns in a day, so a rickshaw-puller and a businessman feel the same pinch and the poor are not jailed for being unable to pay. And England and Wales have run a system of police cautions for decades: a first-time, low-level offender admits what they did, receives a formal warning, and that is the end of it unless they do it again. No court, no jail, no criminal record hanging over a job application.The law we need already exists. We just don’t use it.Bangladesh does not need a new statute to do any of this. The Probation of Offenders Ordinance has been on our books since 1960. Section 4 allows a court to discharge an offender conditionally. Section 5 allows a probation order of one to three years under a probation officer, on a bond to keep the peace. Section 6 allows compensation to the person wronged.The Supreme Court issued a circular on February 12, 2019 directing every subordinate court to use it, explicitly to relieve pressure on the prisons. A handful of judges have done so imaginatively, discharging people on conditions like planting trees, reading books, or caring for elderly parents.Yet, this law is barely used. Justice M. Imman Ali from the Appellate Division has noted that trial courts rarely use probation, blaming it on a widespread punitive mindset among judges. BLAST’s research found that in 2009-10, only 261 people – adults and children – were put on probation nationwide, and the next year that number dropped to 43. The probation service is always short-staffed. We created this system sixty-six years ago but never put it to work.A ladder, not a cellHere’s what a real alternative could look like, using tools we already have and following models that have worked elsewhere.Criticism, satire, cartoons, sharing a speech: no case. Ever. The Home Ministry and the Inspector General should instruct in writing that Section 54 and the Anti-Terrorism Act are not to be used for anything a person has said or posted, and that no arrest on a speech complaint may happen without a magistrate first looking at the post. This one instruction would end most of what is happening now.Crude abuse, no threat, first time: a caution. The person is summoned, sits in a magistrate’s chamber, is told plainly that what they wrote was beneath them, signs an undertaking under Section 4 of the 1960 Ordinance, takes the post down. No custody, no charge sheet, no record. Once.Repeat abuse, or abuse that targets family members or women: community service or a day fine. Forty to a hundred and twenty hours under a probation officer, in a park, a hospital ward, a railway station, an old-age home, a flood shelter. No badge, no vest, no photograph for the party Facebook page; the Tokyo Rules are clear that the dignity of the offender is to be protected, and a sentence designed to humiliate would simply hand the opposition another martyr. Or, where a fine fits better, one scaled to what the person actually earns, so the rich activist and the poor one pay the same proportion.Genuine defamation of a private person: the civil courts. Damages, retraction, an apology. That is what every functioning democracy does with reputational harm, and it is what General Comment 34 asks of us.Threats, incitement, doxxing, harassment: the criminal law, properly applied. Investigated by a cyber unit that knows the difference between a threat and a joke.Two more things cost nothing. The new Act already says only the aggrieved person may complain; the courts should throw out anything filed by a party worker on a minister’s behalf, and say so publicly. And the prime minister could end the whole cycle with one sentence to his own party: stop filing complaints about what people say about me. A leader with a two-thirds majority does not need Jubo Dal to defend his honour on Facebook.Why this issue is more important than it seemsIt might be tempting to dismiss this as just another complaint from human rights groups. But that would be a mistake, for reasons that go beyond what outsiders say.Custodial torture has decreased in this country, and that’s a real improvement. But torture still happens in custody. Every night someone isn’t locked up is a night they’re not at risk, and every arrest that doesn’t happen is one less chance for police to fall back into old habits. You don’t reform the police by giving lectures. You do it by removing the situations where they can misbehave.The prisons are not going to build their way out of a 217% occupancy rate. The only thing that empties a prison is fewer people going in.And there is the government’s own interest. The July uprising was, at bottom, a revolt against a state that treated criticism as sedition. The February election was the cleanest in a generation and the country believed in it. Every arrest over a cartoon spends a little of that credit, and the people spending it are not the prime minister but the local activists and station officers who have learned that this is what power looks like.A government that has just been given the most legitimate mandate in living memory can afford to be laughed at. It cannot afford to look like the last one. The real test of whether August 2024 brought change isn’t the election. It’s whether a 22-year-old can post something foolish about the prime minister and still sleep in his own bed that night.Zulkarnain Saer is a Bangladeshi-born investigative journalist based in the United Kingdom.