There are tangible measures being taken to fix Pakistan’s broken justice system. One of the most misunderstood legal concepts in Pakistan is that of ‘speedy justice and Pakistan’s civil justice ranking on a survey by the World Justice Project bleak picture and provides justification as to why some citizens are bent on leaving the country or at least embarrassed of their nationality.

The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Pakistan Asif Saeed Khan Khosa expressed disappointment over the role of the parliament in provision of inexpensive and speedy justice.

The Justice Khosa gave the example of the Anti-Terrorism Act (ATA) which is widely misused in the country. He maintained that any act from a murder to rape can be trialed under the said law which is not appropriate. The CJP clarified that the seven-member bench of the Supreme Court shall give its judgment and determine the scope of the ATA.

According to the Law and Justice Commission of Pakistan, a total of 1,873,085 cases were pending disposal in all the superior and subordinate courts of Pakistan as on November 30, 2017. As per the statistics compiled by the L&JCP, the Supreme Court has 38,071 cases pending till November 30.

Moreover, the judges can’t do more, the amount of work our judges are doing here, no one is doing anywhere in the world. A total of 3,000 judges are appointed in the country. Last year 34m cases were wrapped up by our courts what more can the judges do?”

All five high courts have a huge number of 293,316 cases, which are yet to be decided. Of them, the Lahore High Court (LHC) has 147,633 pending cases; the Sindh High Court (SHC) has 93,404 undecided cases; the Peshawar High Court (PHC) has a pendency of 29,525 cases; the Balochistan High Court (BHC) has 6,510 cases awaiting decisions; and the IHC has 16,244 pending cases.

Furthermore, according to the report, the district judiciary — sessions judges, additional sessions judges, senior civil judges, and civil judges is also faced with an enormous pendency of 1,541,119 cases. Although the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa is small in size compared to Sindh, its district judiciary has more than double the number of undecided cases. The district judiciary of Punjab has 1,187,076 pending cases; the district judiciary of Sindh has 99,820; the district judiciary of KP has 204,209 cases; the district judiciary of Balochistan has 13,009 cases; the district judiciary of Islamabad has 37,005 cases awaiting disposal.

CJP also argued that courts in other countries were over-burdened but in the case of Pakistan, he pointed out, a large number of cases posed many difficulties to the idea of inexpensive and speedy justice. “The US Supreme Court wraps 80 to 90 cases every year. The Supreme Court in the United Kingdom wraps up 100 cases each year. The Supreme Court of Pakistan wrapped up 26,000 cases last year,” he pointed out.

Providing a solution to the matter, the chief justice said: “The way to fix this is to fix the causes of delay in judgments. The parliament should look over laws to see how judicial review can be made better than before.”

The parliament in the present form is not able to make any significant changes due to a number of seat different political parties have. The PTI has the majority of seats but does require the support of its allies, and perhaps of the opposition, to bring any constitutional amendment. Moreover, allies or parties sitting on the opposition benches have their own interests therefore, it is unlikely that there shall be any serious debate on law-making in the parliament.