Court staff protest against lawyers

Stenographer attacked for stopping a lawyer from chamber.

LAHORE: Over a hundred staffers of banking courts staged a protest demonstration on Friday at the Federal Courts Complex, against lawyers who thrashed a court employee earlier this week.

They said Atta Muhammad, a stenographer at Banking Court-II, claims that he was beaten up for stopping a lawyer from entering the chamber of a judge.

The lawyers have not been identified yet.

The protest and boycott of court proceedings was called off after three hours after Farhad Ali Shah, general secretary of the Lahore Bar Association, intervened and assured them that action will taken against those responsible.

Muhammad told The Express Tribune that on December 27, a lawyer came to the court and said that he wanted to meet judge Chaudhary Shahid Naseer.

Muhammad stooped him as the judge had forbidden him to let anyone enter his office while he worked. But the lawyer got angry at being stopped. He said that he wanted to meet the judge to seek a stay order in a case. But the stenographer still refused to allow him to go inside.

Meanwhile, the judge called Muhammad into his chamber to dictate some orders and the lawyer forcibly entered the chamber. The lawyer requested the judge for a stay order but the judge told him to wait as he was busy. The lawyer then placed the case file on the judge’s table and left the chamber. The case was eventually forwarded to Banking Court-III, to which it was relevant.

On January 5, as many as 10 lawyers appeared in Muhammad’s room and started beating him. They also damaged a printer and an electric heater and took his mobile phone with them. They later took him to the corridor of the complex and then the bar room where over 20 lawyers joined in beating him.

The lawyers told him to tender an apology to the lawyer whom he had stopped from entering the judge’s chamber and let him go after he apologised.

Muhammad said that the judge had asked him to identify the lawyers so that action could be taken against them. He said he did not know their names but could recognise the faces.

Shah said that it was difficult to take action against the lawyers if court staff did not know their names. “Perhaps staffers want to conceal the real reason for the scuffle,” Shah said.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 7^th, 2012.