Law of Bangladesh

Bangladesh inherited a common law system from British rule over British India, a lineage traced to the Charter of 1726 granted by King George I, which authorized the East India Company to establish Mayor Courts in Calcutta and produced the first codified law applied to Bengal. Since independence in 1971, statutory law enacted by Parliament has been the main source of legislation, compiled together with older colonial-era statutes in the Bangladesh Code, whose entries before 1987 are mostly in English and afterward mostly in Bengali. The Supreme Court holds an unusually strong role for a common law jurisdiction, empowered not only to interpret acts of Parliament but to declare them null and void and to enforce citizens' fundamental rights. Family law remains governed separately by each community own religious law, Islamic sharia for Muslims, Hindu personal law for Hindus and Buddhists, and the Christian Marriage Act for Christians, while the World Justice Project ranked Bangladesh 103rd of 113 countries on rule of law as of 2016.