Arafat Rahman Akram (International Islamic University of Malaysia – Ahmad Ibrahim Kulliyyah of Laws) has posted Who Bears the Cost of Public Purpose? Compulsory Land Acquisition, Compensation and Judicial Review in Bangladesh through the ECHR Fair-Balance Principle on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
Compulsory land acquisition sits at the point where development policy becomes an individual constitutional burden. Bangladesh formally protects property under Article 42 of the Constitution and the Acquisition and Requisition of Immovable Property Act 2017 provides a structured acquisition process, enhanced compensation, arbitration and appeal. Yet the legal architecture contains a tension that monetary multipliers alone do not resolve. Article 42(2) protects the statutory compensation framework from challenge merely on the ground of inadequacy, while the 2017 Act channels disputes into specialist remedial routes and restricts ordinary suits against acquisition measures. Recent High Court decisions, however, show that constitutional review remains indispensable where land is used without lawful acquisition or where statutory legality is contested. This article asks who should bear the cost of public purpose when the State takes land and how far Bangladesh’s existing framework can be evaluated through the European Convention on Human Rights’ fair-balance principle. The ECHR is used as a functional comparator, not as binding law. The analysis draws on Article 1 of Protocol No. 1, Strasbourg expropriation jurisprudence, and targeted comparisons with Italian and Spanish constitutional and statutory arrangements. It argues that Bangladesh’s principal vulnerability is not the nominal generosity of compensation but the interaction of five variables: public-purpose definition, participation, valuation integrity, timing, and effective review. A multiplier applied to an unreliable valuation baseline may still produce an unfair result; conversely, judicial review that re-prices every award would collapse the statutory scheme. The article therefore proposes a fair-balance review model that separates legality from adequacy, preserves statutory arbitration for valuation disputes, and reserves constitutional review for defects of authority, procedure, arbitrariness and remedial failure. The objective is not to constitutionalise every compensation dispute, but to make public acquisition legally disciplined, reviewable and institutionally coherent.
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