The Law and Justice Commission of Pakistan says there are an estimated 1.9 million pending cases in various courts across the country.
Around 40,871 of the pending cases are in the Supreme Court of Pakistan alone. The backlog was 18,000 in 2013 and then grew to 38,539 in 2018.
Similarly, a total of 1,458,845 court cases are awaiting a hearing in the district judiciary and 130,746 in special courts/tribunals.
The province wise data says that there are 1,095,542 pending cases in Punjab, 101,095 in Sindh, 209,984 in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, 13,969 in Balochistan and 38,291 in Islamabad.
This calls for immediate action!
Pakistan’s judicial system is under extreme stress. Its population has grown to 207 million, according to the Census report 2017. The total number of judges in the country available for this population is around 4000. This means there is one judge for every 48,838 people in the country.
Soon after taking oath Chief Justice of Pakistan, Asif Saeed Khosa, had expressed his disappointment on the massive pendency and vowed to “set his own house in order by making necessary judicial reforms”.
“Even if the entire judiciary consisting of all judges of the Supreme Court, all high courts and subordinate judiciary work day and night, 4,000 judges aren’t enough to clear the backlog,” the CJ had observed while hearing a murder case in 2018. The magnitude of the problem is even more jarring, considering that these cases have to be cleared by the 4,000-strong judiciary.
