Expeditious justice

In order to expedite justice in cases involving jail petitions, a Supreme Court bench has proposed formation of three-judge benches to hear appeals filed by people convicted by high courts. Such petitions are known as jail petitions. Now around 2,500 such petitions are pending in the top court. The need for three-judge benches arises out of the difficulty that usually a division bench (a two-judge bench of the apex court) takes up such cases but they cannot pass a final order in cases where a division bench of a high court has convicted a person. This is causing delays in the dispensation of justice.

Hearing a jail petition recently, a division bench of the Supreme Court headed by Justice Qazi Faez Isa took notice of the difficulty and asked the registrar of the apex court to inform the Chief Justice of Pakistan about the need for setting up three-judge benches to hear pleas against decision given by division benches of high courts. The bench noted that the present system often led to inordinate delays in hearing of petitions extending from 10 years to 20 years, which means that by then petitioners would have served life sentence or half of a life sentence. This goes against the adage, justice delayed is justice denied, even though here questions involving another adage, Justice hurried is justice buried, don’t arise. Justice Isa said formation of three-judge benches would substantially reduce the large number of such pending cases.

Our courts have long been struggling with the pendency of cases. In March this year, as many as 1.8 million cases were pending in the courts of Pakistan. Only in the Supreme Court, about 45, 500 cases were pending till July 31. The top court has 17 judges. Former Chief Justice of Pakistan Asif Saeed Khosa had said that if judges were appointed to 25% of the vacancies in the system, the backlog of cases would be cleared within a year or two. The law’s delays are well known and countries have tried to eliminate this with varying degrees of success.