Daily Times

Delayed justice is termed as denial of justice. Thousands are denied of the justice daily and their cases remain pending for years and ears in the courts of law for one reason or the other. Many could be the reasons behind the obnoxiously delayed cases. One of the reason as reported by the common justice seekers are the hurdles in speedy dispensation of justice.

A judge has only 2.4 minutes for a hearing as the Chief Justice of Pakistan Mian Saqib Nisar has mentioned in his speech at the National Judicial Policy Making Committee (NJPMC) meeting at the Supreme Court Karachi Registry on Saturday. What could be done in two and a half minutes except to postpone the hearing of the case until the next date? The same exercise would be repeated on the next date if someone does not find a suitable source to influence or charm the judge to go extra miles to give due attention and time to hearing his or her case.

If a judge gives due time and attention to a case-hearing, a number of other cases would suffer long delays as a routine matter. The most dangerous hurdle in dispensing the justice is the indiscriminate delays caused by the judge-counsel nexus as well. Now it is a vividly open phenomenon, and surely no one can deny that Counsels of the parties and Prosecution gets undue time delays to benefit their parties or to just frustrate the other one. The other most affected segment of the population is the fast increasing lower middle-class. Only a few per cent of the total population of our country remains with the option of justice, no matter when the get it but sure they will. The more influential ones get sooner and the other may get a little later. But surely they will be obliged with due or undue justice.

Gone are the days when judges and other actors in the justice system used have some consideration of hierarchical accountability or hitting the headlines in media for injustice or causing injustice intentionally for the obvious reasons. Now the derogatory media image of anyone in the justice sector has become an ‘effective tool’ of ‘marketing’. The justice seekers come to know easily to whom they shall approach to find timely justice and what shall be the cost to buy it safe and sound.

Gone are the days when the judges and other actors in the justice system had some consideration of hierarchical accountability

I don’t believe hierarchical accountably serves anything good. When the service rules are very ‘servant’ friendly and the ‘friends’ in the hierarchy and the system itself provides ample opportunities to go unpunished who would be bothered about the accountability processes. When the media has turned to be more public relations tool than pursuing the accountability of the malefactors, then whom else to blame for rise of injustice in the justice sector.

There may be some meagre chances of objective and unbiased court reporting in the metropolitan cities. Some of the courts at least may take into their consideration the possibility of the aggrieved party to going to media if the process is delayed too much to favour the other party or the undue tactics are used. So the ratio of undue and ill-practices may be low in proportionate to subordinate judiciary in the far flung cities and towns where the common peoples’ access to hierarchical accountability channel is even far from their day-dreaming.

The dejected and disappointed justice seekers’ chances to access mainstream media are out of scene. If luckily they find some mainstream media representatives, you cannot bank upon their skills as mostly the journalists lack the capacity of the court reporting. In most of the cases their own vested interest and social networking is compromised in the wake of unbiased and factual reporting.

Chief Justice of Pakistan Mian Saqib Nisar has expressively mentioned many reasons in the speedy dispensation of justice and put forth many recommendation including legislation by the parliament to shortfall of judges and the capacity issues in terms of human resources and infrastructure, and so on. I humbly beg to ask him to probe sometime into the sorry affairs of the Asian Development Bank funded $355 million the Access to Justice Programme (AJP) of the Ministry of Law and Justice, and other similar donor-funded projects implemented in the country, you would get to know the reasons, and the remedies also lies with you Sir.

The writer is an Islamabad-based policy advocacy, strategic communication and outreach expert. He can be reached at devcom.pakistan@gmail.com. He tweets @EmmayeSyed

Published in Daily Times, January 16^th 2018.