Search for justice

Let me remind you about three recent cases.

Ghulam Sarwar and Ghulam Qadir, two brothers hailing from Sadiqabad, were charged with murder in 2002 and were given death sentences. The Supreme Court finally overturned their conviction in 2016, only to find out that they had been executed a year earlier.

In a land inheritance case in Bahawalpur, the litigants finally got justice after a delay of 100 years, when the Supreme Court in 2018 disposed of their case. The case was originally filed in 1918 in a court of Rajasthan, India.

Asma Nawab, a 16-year-old girl, was charged with murdering three members of her family 20 years ago and was given a death sentence by an Anti-Terrorism Court soon afterwards. Earlier this year, the Supreme Court acquitted her of all charges due to insufficient evidence. She was set free but can never be compensated for her lost time. The triple murder, on the other hand, remains a mystery as a testament to the police and prosecution’s performance.

The justice system in Pakistan is rife with countless such stories but these three cases truly depict the sorry state of our justice system, marred with weak investigation and prosecution, lack of coordination between different rule of law institutions and excessive delays. Low number of disposals has led to piling case backlog in courts, while technology has so far failed to create a dent in the opacity of the system.

The backlog of cases in the Supreme Court more than doubled during the last five years but it is just the tip of the iceberg. About 2+ million cases are pending across the judicial system, including district courts. More than 10% of cases in the high courts have been pending for more than seven years.

One may wonder if this is how the justice system typically works in developing countries but that is not the case. Last year, Pakistan was ranked 105^th amongst 113 countries on the World Justice Project’s Rule of Law Index.

The criminal justice system fared relatively better but we were still ranked lower than India, Nepal and Sri Lanka. On civil justice, however, we scored even lower than Afghanistan and lowest in South Asia.

Within the index, Pakistan performs poorly on almost all dimensions, including due process of law, rights of the accused, timeliness and effectiveness of criminal adjudication, access, affordability and enforcement of civil cases and most importantly incidence of corruption. But there is one area where Pakistan is one of the top scorers in South Asia and that is being ‘free from improper government influence’, depicting an independent judiciary and underscoring the opportunity for the judiciary to lead reforms in the dysfunctional rule of law system.

Judicial reforms are part and parcel of the PTI’s manifesto. The party has committed to launch a judicial reforms programme within 100 days to ensure speedy and fair disposal of all civil cases within one year and to clear the backlog of pending cases. It is also committed to bring about changes to more than a century-old civil and criminal procedure codes, digitising case records and introducing case management, prison and parole reforms.

Moreover, any reform in criminal justice system would ultimately depend upon complementing changes in investigation and prosecution, whereas those on the civil side would need improvement in land titles and alternative dispute-resolution mechanisms.

The government has already created task forces for this purpose. But whether they will be able to create a dent in this archaic system remains to be seen.

Rule of law is closely tied to a country’s prosperity and no matter what we do, without fixing the justice system we should not expect the country to recover from its economic woes.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 9^th, 2018.

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