According to The Economist, the recordings and emails suggested that the Bangladesh Government pressured and attempted to intervene in the International Crimes Tribunal to speed up proceedings.
[1] The Bangladeshi newspaper Amar Desh also received the conversations, and published a report on 9 December, followed by the transcripts in full.
On 13 December, a court injunction banned Bangladeshi newspapers from publishing the materials, at which time Amar Desh stopped further publication.
Despite demands from Jamaat-e-Islami for the Tribunal to be scrapped, the Law Minister Shafique Ahmed said that Huq's resignation would not hamper trial proceedings.
Between 2010 and 2012, the tribunal indicted eleven men as suspects; they are now political leaders, nine from Jamaat-e-Islami, two from the BNP and zero from the Awami League.
[1] On 6 December 2012, the presiding judge of ICT-1, Mohammed Nizamul Huq, passed an order requiring two members of The Economist to appear before the court, demanding that they explain how they came into possession of e-mails and conversations between him and lawyer Ziauddin.
According to The Economist, the Skype conversations and e-mails suggested that the Bangladesh Government pressured and attempted to intervene in the International Crimes Tribunal to speed proceedings up.
[11] Ahmed Ziauddin is a Bangladeshi lawyer and academic specializing in international courts of law, who lives and works in Brussels, Belgium.
He was born in Dhaka, then part of East Pakistan, where he went to college and law school, and his brother was a friend of Mohammed Nizamul Huq.
[5] Ziauddin is a professor of international law at Catholic University of Brussels,[12] where he is the full-time director of the Bangladesh Centre for Genocide Studies.
[13] Weeks before the Skype controversy came to public light, Ziauddin attended a conference at the Assembly of States Parties of the International Criminal Court at The Hague in November 2012 where Toby Cadman, who is the defense attorney for the accused in Bangladesh's International Crimes Tribunal and the most high-profile critic of the process.
[They ask for help] if they feel if there are people more informed about the issue, especially where [international law] is so new in Bangladesh ... I’m not really advising him, but if there is a question then I try to respond.
[1] After the disclosure of their conversations came to light, Ziauddin was also called before Bangladesh's war crimes court to answer for his participation, a case which is in progress.
Despite demands from Jamaat-e-Islami for the tribunal to be scrapped, the Law Minister Shafique Ahmed said that Huq's resignation would not hamper trial proceedings.
Salahuddin Quader Chowdhury, BNP MP on trial at ICT-1, demanded adjournment of his case until the petition was settled.