Now, Article 26 no longer provided an absolute safeguard of "fundamental rights" but allowed them to be circumvented by amendments.
The act was purportedly designed to crush black marketers and smugglers, said to be responsible for the food shortages throughout the country.
As political dissent by left-wing guerrillas intensified, Prime Minister Sheikh Mujibur Rahman cracked down through a series of measures: a printing and press ordinance, a three-month ban on strikes, a ban on public gatherings, the declaration of a state of emergency under which civil rights were suspended and finally the establishment of one-party rule in 1975.
The case of the government was that the detainee had been held under section 3 of the Special Powers Act, 1974, for various activities such as illegal possession of arms, robberies and murders.
[2] The court observed the following:[2] The English principle as expressed by Lord Atkin in his dissenting speech in Liversidge v Anderson, that every imprisonment without trial and conviction is prima facie unlawful and the onus in upon the detaining authority to justify the detention by establishing the legality of its action according to the principles of English law has been adopted in the legal system of this Subcontinent, as has been rightly observed by Hamoodur Rahman, J., (as he then was) in the Government of West Pakistan and another vs. Begum Agha Abdul Karim Sohorish Kashmiri.It is further observed in Aruna Sen's case that an order of detention of malafide or collated purpose is illegal, it must be shown that the grounds of detention are relevant and do not suffer from vagueness, are not indefinite and are not such as to deprive the detained person of his constitutional and legal right of making an effective representation against his detention at the earliest opportunity as provided in clause (5) of Article 33 of the Constitution and subsection (1) of section 8 of the Special Powers Act, 1974.
[1] The case showed that the Bangladesh High Court had wider powers for judicial review than its regional counterparts in the rest of Asia.