The Constitution of Bangladesh, officially the Constitution of the People's Republic of Bangladesh, is the supreme law of Bangladesh. The constitution was adopted by the Constituent Assembly of Bangladesh on 4 November 1972, it came into effect on 16 December 1972. The constituent assembly was composed of officials elected in the national and provincial council elections of Pakistan held in 1970. The denial of this electoral body resulted in the Bangladesh Liberation War. The Constitution establishes Bangladesh as a unitary parliamentary republic. Directly borrowing from the four tenets of Mujibism, the political ideas of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the constitution states nationalism, socialism, democracy and secularism as its four fundamental principles.
While the Constitution nominally declares the protection of fundamental rights and an independent judiciary, it has been often criticized for fostering autocracy and failing to safeguard human rights. The Fundamental Principles of State Policy in Part II are often described as empty rhetoric due to their unjusticiability, while Fundamental Rights in Part III are constrained by extensive, imposable restrictions. Loopholes in the guise of poorly defined 'restrictions' in rights provisions have enabled the continued enforcement of the repressive sections of British colonial laws such as the Penal Code of 1860 and the Code of Criminal Procedure of 1898, and facilitated the enactment of later repressive laws such as the Special Powers Act of 1974, and the Cyber Security Act of 2023.