A crippled justice system

Justice systems the world over are notorious for being slow, but those in the subcontinent are slower than most others. India is perhaps the worst in the world when it comes to pending and unresolved cases but Pakistan does not lag that far behind as evidenced by the Supreme Court Annual report 2016-17. It makes for depressing reading and indicates that overall the trend in pendency is upwards. There are 38,913 cases pending in the Supreme Court alone as of April 30^th — a backlog that is almost insurmountable. Men and women are going to die of old age before their cases are heard and resolved. The rate of pendency has risen by 100 per cent in the last five to seven years, with 2016 a particularly bad year.

Apparently this disgraceful state of affairs is discussed within the judiciary from time to time seemingly to little effect. The reasons for this travesty of injustice are multiple, often interlinked and none of them likely to be resolved in the foreseeable future. That the system serves litigants poorly was coincidentally obvious with the release almost at the same time the report was made public of Asma Nawab, who has spent 20 years in jail for a crime she is now belatedly found not to have committed for which she could have been hanged. She was jailed as a teenager and now has to find her way in the world outside. Her story is not uncommon. She has no family and no redress and is now reliant on the comfort of friends and well-wishers.

What the report also illustrates is the woeful inadequacies elsewhere in the extended justice system, the infrastructure that serves it. Corruption in police forces and incompetent evidence gathering, lawyers more interested in their fees than their clients and any number of frivolous cases that clog the system. There are innumerable abuses of human rights, poor or absent justice for minorities and women and the list goes on. There are aspects of justice that are capable of reform if the political will is there, but therein lies the rub. And the priority for reform by the new government? Distant at best.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 22^nd, 2018.

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