KARACHI: Calling a lawyer is never easy. That will change through an initiative launched by the Legal Aid Office (LAO) through which members of the civil society will be able to place a call in order to obtain access to legal consultation.

This initiative was launched at a conference titled “Access to justice: strengthening legal awareness and delivery of legal services in Sindh”.

As a part of the British High Commission’s Development Alternatives Inc on an enhanced democratic accountability and civic engagement project, this call centre promises to provide swift and effective legal consultation and advice to any person that may require it.

Explaining about the working on the call centre, Asad Jamil mentioned that every call that comes in will be monitored, the nature of the legal inquiry will be logged and the advising lawyer will then later respond with the recommended solution. The maximum time within which to respond to a request would be 24 hours. This centre should be up and running in its full capacity within a couple of weeks. Where they are expecting to experience technical glitches in the first week of operation, they are confident they will be resolved soon.

“We are making this service available to all of the silent victims who otherwise wouldn’t be able to speak out,” he stressed.

Speaking on the occasion, Supreme Court Justice Mushir Alam said: “Pakistan is thankful for this initiative.”

Along with the praise, he did have some pointers for the project. “The legal fraternity needs to be onboard for this project,” he said and added: “Especially those who are averse to any alternative solutions other than the traditional method.”

He added that executor agencies such as prosecutors and law enforcement agencies also needed to come on board to ensure the effectiveness of this model. “There should also be social sector branding of this project, so that this can become a household name,” he said.

“There should be training as well as in-house accountability of this initiative otherwise people will lose faith in it,” stressed Justice Mushir Alam.

The government was supposed to aid citizens in getting inexpensive and speedy justice, but the courts alone were not enough to resolve this growing problem, he said, mentioning that the judiciary would be “more than happy to support this project” and that he would throw his own weight behind it to sustain that support as well.

About marginalisation of minorities in Pakistan, Justice Alam said: “Why should we call a Hindu, Parsi or Christian a minority, are we not all Pakistanis?”

“Our problems are common, we are all suffering. The internally displaced are also Muslims, the jihadist who kills also kills Muslims, have we failed to address the plight of the majority?”

He added that the real divisions in our society were between the haves and have-nots, criminal and victim and the privileged and underprivileged.

He said that the constitution was a social contract with all of the citizens of the country, and not just any particular section of them. Other speakers included retired Justice Nasir Alam Zahid, Zahid Elahi, Professor Akmal Wasim, Saleem Michael of the Justice Helpline, Mahnaz Rehman of the Aurat Foundation and Ahmed Chinoy of the Citizen-Police Liaison Committee.

Published in Dawn, September 14th, 2014