KARACHI, Nov 27: The Sindh government is committed to facilitate the judiciary in the province with adequate funds for its future requirements and all necessary steps are also being taken to strengthen the ‘Access to Justice Programme’ (AJP) in the province.

This assurance was given by Sindh Chief Secretary Fazalur Rehman to the AJP Director Afzal Kahute during a meeting to review the progress of the AJP.

The programme was launched with the assistance of the Asian Development Bank (ADB) in 2001 when it came to light that 119,969 cases were pending in Sindh, over a million in Punjab, 159,074 in the NWFP and 6,024 in Balochistan due to extremely poor ratio of judges per population in Pakistan where one judge was available for every 140,000 persons.

Since the launching of the programme, a number of steps have been taken to strengthen judiciary and other concerned institutions by providing better infrastructure, latest gadgets so that these institutions could come up with inexpensive and expeditious justice for all.

During the review, the chief secretary noted that law and order was one of the top priorities, a medium term budgetary framework had been developed by the Sindh High Court.

It was agreed that allocations to the judiciary over the medium term would be guided /consulted.

The chief secretary elaborated that the district public safety commissions and citizen police liaison committees were being geared up as these were the significant parts of police reforms.

The meeting, which was attended by PPO Sindh Jehangir Mirza, Secretary Finance Malik Asrar Hussain and provincial programme manager of AJP Shahid Shafiq, also reviewed the progress so far achieved on police development plans, human rights policy of police, consumer protection and prosecution services programmes.