Litigants face problems as lawyers continue strike

Cases adjourned as chambers usurp seating space for litigants

ISLAMABAD: Even though judges have returned after the winter vacations ended on Tuesday, litigants in the district courts of Islamabad have seen hearings of hundreds of cases delayed for the past two days owing to an ongoing strike by lawyers.

Lawyers associated with the Islamabad Bar Association (IBA) have been on strike for the past 12 days after their chambers were demolished overnight in the Sector F-8 Kutchery. While lawyers usually attend important cases such as those of bail, during the ongoing strike, lawyers have chosen to boycott even those cases.

As a result, cases in the district courts have had to be adjourned without any hearings.

On the one hand, litigants are seeing their cases adjourned due to the absence of lawyers, on the other, the demolition of the lawyer’s chambers means that litigants have few places left to sit in the Kutchery between hearings.

Things have been made worse by the construction of chambers by some lawyer within the facilitation centre set up for litigants.

After the lawyers filed a case over judges rotation, lawyers claim, their chambers within the Kutcher were torn down. When the tried to rebuild their chambers, some of them clashed with the staff of the post office who filed a case against the lawyers with the police on December 22 for allegedly grabbing land. Later, the Islamabad Police lodged another case of land grabbing against 14 lawyers on December 27 for building chambers in the facilitation centre and wrote to a district and sessions judge terming the lawyers and their chambers a security risk.

This angered the lawyers who have not only continued their strike but have demanded that the police cases registered against them are withdrawn and that the government build their chambers. Failing which, they had warned to stage protest rallies and to build chambers all around the kutchery.

Meanwhile, lawyers have now decided to head to the Supreme Court on Thursday to attend hearings of the judges’ rotation case.

This was decided in a well-attended meeting of the IBA on Wednesday at the Sector F-8 kutchery. The meeting was chaired by IBA President Riyasat Ali Azad.

Addressing the district bar meeting, lawyers stated that the government has failed to see and address the issues of the federal capital’s lawyers. They further claimed that cases were registered against lawyers in order to put the issue of judges rotation on the back burner.

They reiterated their resolve to continue their boycott until judges in the district courts are rotated. If necessary, the courts will be locked up.

The IBA’s former joint secretary Asif Ali Tamboli told Daily Express that they wanted judges in Islamabad to be rotated just as they are in other provinces of the country.



Moreover, he pointed out that a committee, headed by the Attorney General of Pakistan Anwar Mansoor, had presented a formula of rotating judges within the capital which would have seen these judges sent to different ministries and in the Supreme Court instead of law officers. Similarly, they would have been transferred within the 25 special courts in the federal capital.

However, Tamboli said that the bar had rejected this formula, maintaining that judges should be rotated across the country.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 3^rd, 2019.