The Appellate Division has scrapped a decade-old judgment  pronounced by the Administrative Appellate Tribunal, due to which 85 upazila election officials who were recruited during the BNP-Jamaat alliance government won’t be getting their jobs back.

A six-member bench headed by Chief Justice Hasan Foez Siddiqui pronounced the judgment on Thursday, accepting the state’s appeal against the tribunal’s decision.

During the hearing, Attorney General AM Amin Uddin and Additional Attorney Generals Sheikh Mohammad Morshed and Mohammad Mehedi Hasan stood for the state, while lawyers AF Hasan Arif, Prabir Niyogi, Salah Uddin Dolon and Kamrul Haque Siddiqui represented the plaintiffs.

According to the court, the BNP-Jamaat government appointed a total of 327 upazila election officials through the Public Service Commission (PSC) on September 3, 2005. The recruitment stirred widespread controversy which led to an evaluation of the officials by the caretaker government in 2007.

The evaluation resulted in dismissal of 85 election officials.

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The sacked officials filed a case against the government decision with the Administrative Appellate Tribunal and got rejected. However, on April 12, 2010, the tribunal accepted an appeal filed by the ex-election officials and pronounced a judgment in favor of their reinstatement.

The prosecution filed a total of four leave to appeal after the tribunal’s judgment, based on which a chamber court of the Appellate Division  stayed the effectiveness of the tribunal’s judgment and sent the case to a full bench of the Appellate Division on April 29, 2010.

In 2011, the prosecution filed another appeal, which started the hearing process that was concluded on August 28, 2022.