Supreme Court Justice Ijazul Ahsan has emphasised the need to bring uniformity in the legal framework prevalent across the country.
He made the remarks while chairing the first meeting of the Alternate Dispute Resolution (ADR) Committee, constituted by Chief Justice Umar Ata Bandial, according to a handout issued on Thursday.
The initiative was proposed by Law and Justice Commission of Pakistan to help the judiciary reduce backlog of cases by implementing the ADR mechanism and ensuring concerted and coordinated efforts to implement it at the national level.
Justice Ahsan called for setting up of ADR Centers, certification of the ADR service providers, a data collection mechanism for monitoring the performance of the centers and the need to provide specialised training to prospective mediators.
He also stressed on steps required to be taken to increase public awareness about the availability of the ADR mechanism at all levels to provide an affordable and effective fora for the resolution of disputes.
His further stated that all stakeholders must be taken on board to ensure the successful and effective implementation of ADR mechanism on a fast-track basis.
In this context, the participants agreed upon benchmarks and milestones for the implementation of various stages suggested and circulated by the secretary of the Law and Justice Commission of Pakistan.
The chair directed all the participants to share their progress within three weeks and the next meeting will be held after a month to review the progress made by the concerned stakeholders. The other members of the committee included Justice Mirza Viqas Rauf of the Lahore High Court (LHC), Justice Adnan Iqbal Chaudhry of the Sindh High Court (SHC), Justice Muhammad Hashim Khan Kakar of the Balochistan High Court (BHC), Justice Abdul Shakoor of the Peshawar High Court (PHC) and Justice Babar Sattar of the Islamabad High Court (IHC).
The federal and provincial law secretaries, and the additional secretary of the home department of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (K-P) also attended the meeting.
The committee deliberated upon the legal framework providing for ADR system in Pakistan and reviewed the progress made by each province and ICT.
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