Daily Times

The year 2022 has seen Pakistan coming to its senses: cut your coat according to your cloth. That is, spend as per the income earned. Habitual of lavish spending, Pakistan has been struggling with methods to collect money from its citizens through a variety of taxes. Other than for flood victims, foreign aid may not hit the country soon.

The year 2022 has taught Pakistan to count on public money to run the national systems, including the army and the judiciary. People have to be taxed to run the systems. This is how a direct relationship has been developed between a common man and any national system’s head, be that the Chief of Army Staff (COAS) or the Chief Justice of Pakistan (CJP). In the past, this relationship was merely ideological and constitutional. Foreign aid, under one head or the other, used to run Pakistan keeping both the COAS and the CJP all-powerful and loosely connected with the taxpayers. Behind closed doors, both offices kept on deciding the country’s destiny.

The year 2022 has told Pakistan that, other than enforced ideological and prescribed constitutional relationships, there is an overarching financial relationship between the top posts and a common man. Through the Constitution of 1973, all powers vested in top slots remained subject to the realities of the Cold War (1945 – 1991). As a willing proxy state, Pakistan amassed a lot of wealth from the west, which required Pakistan to watch its interests. After 1991, a twenty-year period (September 2001 – August 2021) also offered Pakistan a godsend opportunity to cash in on the presence of foreign troops in Afghanistan, but that facility is no more available. Now, the sole source to run the country is public money.

Pakistan is now heavily relying on the pockets of a common man to run its affairs.

Focusing on the judiciary, one can find huge judicial complexes such as High Courts. The higher judiciary felt omnipotent after the success of the lawyers’ movement meant for reinstating the deposed CJP, Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, who was restored in March 2009. The post-2009 era witnessed a considerable rise in the judges’ salaries, besides a sizable increase in their perks and privileges. Like other high courts, the Lahore High Court (LHC) became centrally air-conditioned. Fresh buildings were constructed. Ceiling fans were made absent. New chauffeur-driven branded cars with costly tyres were provided to the judges, besides personal staff. Seeing the trend, the lawyers also increased their fees manifold.

Just after about a decade, on the performance front, Pakistan saw CJP Mian Saqib Nisar doing public works. Instead of improving the judiciary’s performance, Justice Nisar remained busy in a futile effort of collecting funds to construct dams. He searched for his respect and relevance in waste disposal of hospitals in 2018. Precisely, instead of improving the performance of the LHC, Justice Nisar kept looking for ways to improve the service delivery of the Services Hospital Lahore. How interesting!

On the performance front, around the same time (June 2016 – February 2018), the LHC’s Chief Justice Syed Mansoor Ali Shah, known for introducing information technology in the court, remained oblivious of the fact that almost all benches were marred by the practice of left-over cases. He remained in denial mode. Similarly, under the spell of protectionism, he never bothered to act on a complaint filed by litigants about the underperformance of the LHC. Moreover, in a case, he remained unsuccessful in appreciating the difference between and the consequent implications of the terms “a PhD with twenty years of relevant experience” and “Twenty years of experience and a PhD,” published in advertisements by the Higher Education Commission, Islamabad. The word “relevant” remained irrelevant to him. The reason was simple: no fear of accountability.

This practice of immunity remained at the cost of public money. After receiving a misjudgment, the litigant is left to the option of filing an appeal, which again requires hiring the costly legal services of a lawyer. Thriving on public money and dispensing misjudgments is a crime to which all must be made answerable. In the higher judiciary, a mechanism must be worked out to look into the matters of misjudgment, delivered whether because of incompetence or as a willful attempt. The mechanism must have public representation to factor in the taxpayers, and the providers of public money to run the judicial system.

The year 2022 has convinced Pakistan that public money matters. Pakistan is now heavily relying on the pockets of a common man to run its affairs, encompassing those of the higher judiciary. For judges, seeking refuge in constitutional provisions (such as the Supreme Judicial Council) is a spent idea. Nevertheless, the financial squeeze inflicted on a common man makes the judges directly answerable to the taxpayers, the benefactors of public money. The judges are beneficiaries of the bounty provided by or obtained from a common man in the name of taxes.

With the prevalent level of judicial discharge, there are two choices: first, the judiciary reverts to the pre-2009 mode of financial restraint; and second, the bench improves its performance.

A method of improving performance is to live stream the court’s proceedings. Access to the courtroom through digital media would not only increase people’s understanding of the courts but also make the judges cognizant of better delivery. Since November 2018, several courts in the United Kingdom and the United States are live streaming the proceedings. Since August 26 this year, India has been live streaming the proceedings of the High Courts of Gujarat, Orissa, Karnataka, Jharkhand, Patna and Madhya Pradesh. Moreover, for the selected cases of national and constitutional importance, live streaming from the Indian Supreme Court is also taking place.

On April 23, Islamabad High Court’s Chief Justice Athar Minallah was permitted to live stream the proceedings of his courtroom on a trial basis, but the project was abandoned later. The need is to live stream proceedings of the courts of Chief Justices of all High Courts and Court Number 1 of the Supreme Court of Pakistan. This is how public money would find due respect.

The writer can be reached at qaisarrashid @yahoo.com