Go for it, Asma

Asma Jahangir can now lead the lawyers into helping the judiciary refocus on its primary constituency, the common man.

Celebrated human rights activist Asma Jahangir’s election as president of the Supreme Court Bar Association could not have come at a better time. There is a lot that someone of her stature can do in the job.

Shortly before Ms Jahangir’s election, Transparency International’s report on corruption in Pakistan described the institution of the judiciary as the second most corrupt institution in the country, after Pakistan Customs, in terms of the liquid graft that flows through it.

The situation that such endemic corruption has created across Pakistan is illustrated by a research recently carried out by the BBC Urdu Service. According to this research, there are more than 1.3 million pending cases in all Pakistani courts, many of them having gone on for decades.

Punjab, the country’s most populous province, leads the rot with nearly a million pending cases followed by Sindh and Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa. It isn’t that the lower judiciary alone is to be blamed. The Supreme Court, the Federal Shariat Court and the high courts have over 185,000 pending cases between them, many for years.

To deal with the situation, no high court is operating a full rota. Lower down, every civil judge is dealing with anything between 8,000 to 10,000 cases despite a high court ruling that no civil judge should have more than 2,000 cases to deal with at any one time. One estimate says that no civil judge can dispose off of more than one per cent of the cases that come before him every day.

One hardly needs any insight or magic to imagine the kind of human tragedies buried under these statistics — stories of an untold number of people for whom nothing has changed since the world famous ‘lawyers’ movement’ that was supposed to have brought in a new era of freedom and independence for the judiciary.

There may be a comprehensive judicial reform already unfolding, or the situation may have improved compared to the time before the lawyers’ movement. But that is certainly not the perception on the streets. The man implicated in a false case and having to appear repeatedly for hearings that never take place cannot be faulted for having little or no faith in whatever reforms are on the way, or already underway.

He is extremely unlikely to be impressed with the Supreme Court’s efforts to have the cases against the Bhuttos and Zardari in Swiss courts revived, nor is he likely to be overawed by the power of the reinstated judiciary when it reacts to false news running on television tickers and goes into a midnight huddle to pre-empt a move that perhaps never was.

He couldn’t care less for the power play between the parliament and the judiciary over the latest constitutional amendment for it has nothing at all to do with his immediate well being.

Neither can we fault him for retaining all of his cynicism when the Supreme Court calls for a list of those who had their loans written off in the past. If anything, chances are that he has begun to hate the judiciary’s suo motu powers which distract it from what is brought before it by genuine litigants.

True that little or none of it falls within the ambit of what Ms Jahangir has been entrusted with. But what is expected of a leader is to set a direction, not sort out the details. And that is where she can do what no other has been able to do before her.

Pakistan’s judiciary, like the rest of the country, is desperately in need of direction. Just as the lawyers helped it deal with the death throes of a dictatorship gone haywire, Asma Jahangir can now lead the lawyers into helping the judiciary refocus on its primary constituency — the proverbial common man.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 31^st, 2010.