EDITORIAL: The glacial speed at which the wheels of justice in this country move can take 10 to 20 years, or more, for an aggrieved party to seek legal remedy. It has been an issue of serious concern for jurists, legal scholars and civil society, leading to the establishment of Law and Justice Commission, National Judicial Policy Making Committee (NJPMC), headed by the Chief Justice of Pakistan, which formulated the National Judicial Policy back in 2009.
Several measures were suggested for expeditious disposal of cases, including setting of time limits for deciding matters pertaining to different categories of cases, and for disposing of old cases on a priority basis. Yet the backlog kept piling up, impelling CJP (1990-93) Mohammad Afzal Zullah to stress the need for effective implementation of the time limit. Then, again, CJP Asif Saeed Khosa, in his famous January 2019 speech at the full court reference for his predecessor, said he would like to build “a dam against undue and unnecessary delays in judicial determination of cases ... and would also try to retire a debt, the debt of pending cases.”
Now a press report quoting data collected by the Law and Justice Commission shows over two million cases — filed up to December 31, 2017 — remained pending in various courts till January of last year. Some 88,661 of them were in the five high courts, while in the subordinate judiciary where a vast majority, nearly 80 percent of all cases, initially land, as of April 30 of last year the number of cases dragging on and on stood at a whopping 130,327. As the legal maximum goes, justice delayed is justice denied.
In this country, however, it can also mean even delayed justice may never be delivered. For, more often than not those seeking equitable remedies lack financial resources to pursue litigation beyond lower courts. Several factors account for this sorry state of affairs, such as archaic colonial era laws, non-existence of witness protection system, lack of proper infrastructure for lower court, and of course the all pervasive problem of corruption.
A major hindrance in timely dispensation of justice, nonetheless, is delaying tactics used by lawyers. It is quite common for them to seek adjournments on one pretext or another so as to serve the interests of their influential clients and keep the fees filling their own pockets. It is worth noting in this context that last February, the then Chief Justice of the Lahore High Court, Justice Mohammad Ameer Bhatti, in a bid to expedite the legal process issued a notification for decentralisation of cases at the tehsil level courts, but had to take it back in the face of protests and a strike threat by the Lahore High Court Bar Association, supported by the Punjab and Pakistan bar associations, since that would have meant fewer cases and legal fees for those in Lahore.
What needs to be done has been addressed to a large extent by the NJPMC. The previous government also made several amendments to the Code of Criminal Procedure (CrPC) as well as several other legal reforms, including obliging trial court judges to answer before high courts for failure to finalise a case within nine months. Yet implementation remains an abiding challenge. It is about time the NJPMC finds a way of ensuring its recommendations, especially time limitation one, are carried through.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2022
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