Islamabad:
The Supreme Court has requested transformative reforms that integrate technological innovation, administrative restructuring and disciplined case management to ensure expeditious elimination of cases.
In a four -page judgment created by Judge Syed Mansoor Ali Shah, he delivered when he heard a case that challenges the auction of an immovable property, the Apex court emphasized that the Judiciary must resort to global lessons and commit to transformative reforms.
“The courts must evolve to timely, transparent and centered justice engines,” the ruling emphasized.
The auction in question occurred in 2011, and the petitioner raised objections the same year, which were dismissed. An appeal was presented to the Superior Court, where he remained for ten years, culminating in a decision in 2021.
Then, the matter reached SC in 2022 and is now going, three years later, in 2025.
The sentence pointed out that judicial systems worldwide have recognized that the delay is not an intractable inevitability but a solutionable institutional challenge.
“Countries such as Singapore, the United Kingdom, Brazil, Estonia, Canada, China, Denmark and Australia have undertaken comprehensive reforms that combine technology, structural innovation and procedural discipline to reduce portfolio and improve judicial efficiency,” the court observed.
“Through tools such as electronic presentation, real -time panels, automated programming and transparent digital supervision, these jurisdictions have gone from being the passive custodians of competitions to the active managers of the delivery of justice. These international experiences underline a basic truth: the delays in justice are not inevitable; they are a product of the institutional design and can be remembered with the vision of the vision, the planning resolution”. “
Judge Shah observed that the delay in the award involves serious macroeconomic and social consequences. “Investments it stops, the contracts are illusory and weakens the institutional legitimacy of the Judiciary.”
“The credibility of a justice system is based not only on the equity of its decisions but also on the punctuality with which those decisions are said.”
In addition, he pointed out that the problem was not simply administrative, but was also constitutional, highlighting that the right to access to justice was guaranteed by articles 4, 9 and 10 of the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, 1973.
“The right to a fair and timely trial appears within him. He delays that makes a remedy ineffective or an illusory right equals a denial of due process. Justice, to be real, must be fair and timely.”
The trial also highlighted the problem scale. “It is pertinent to note that more than 2.2 million cases are currently pending before the courts of Pakistan, including approximately 55,941 cases before this court alone, despite improving the number of judges in court. These figures are not abstract; they represent disputes suspended in time.”
The court indicated that the delay is not simply the result of the congestion of the file or the inefficiencies at the branch level; It is a deeper structural challenge of judicial governance.
“The Court, as a matter of institutional policy and constitutional responsibility, must make an urgent transition towards a modern, receptive and intelligent case management framework.”
“Such a system must, at least, to guarantee: the early fixation of the cases on a non -discriminatory basis; the elimination of the ‘saltpetering of the tail’ and the preferential programming; the prioritization of the issues that involve constitutional, economic or national cases without compromising the timely resolution of individual claims; the implementation of the intensity of the age for the age to identify the age of age to identify the age of age to identify the age of age to identify the age of age to identify the age of age to identify the age of age to identify the age of age to identify the age of age to identify the age of age to identify the age nationals;
In the present case, the Court indicated that the petitioner appeal remained pending before the Superior Court for ten years.
“It is beyond Cavile that the delay in the award of cases by the courts at any level of the justice system corrodes public trust in the Judiciary, undermines the rule of law and disproportionately harms the weak and vulnerable that cannot pay the cost of prolonged litigation,” the failure agreed.
