ISLAMABAD: The executive committee of the Pakistan Bar Council (PBC) – the apex regulatory body of lawyers – has criticised a proposed legislation calling for increasing the strength of Supreme Court judges from 17 to 27.

A bill to this effect was recently taken up by the Senate and is part of its initiative for ‘Provision of Inexpensive and Speedy Justice.’

The committee’s chairman, Mohammad Shuaib Shaheen, has moved a resolution against the proposal, saying that “a common litigant is suffering the most because of inordinate delays in disposal of cases, a large number of which are pending in lower courts, mainly because of inadequate number of judges. Similarly, a large number of cases are pending in high courts.”

The resolution suggests that instead of increasing the number of Supreme Court judges, the strength of the lower courts and high courts should be increased on a priority basis.

The resolution demands that the proposal be dropped ab inito.

There were 22,764 cases pending before the Supreme Court at the end of 2014. In the five high courts, the number was 282,049.

These included 164,683 in the Lahore High Court, 70,046 in Sindh High Court, 27,541 in Peshawar High Court, 5,279 in Balochistan High Court and 14,500 in Islamabad High Court.

Talking to Dawn, Mr Shaheen said there was a dearth of senior and competent judges in the lower judiciary as well as in the high courts and for that reason the Supreme Court had recently inducted judges on an ad-hoc basis.

He said that if the parliament was to adopt the legislation, there would be more ad-hoc appointments because the situation in the high courts remained unchanged and there were few judges eligible to be promoted to the apex court.

According to Senator Saeed Ghani, the proposed legislation is still under discussion and the relevant committee would likely invite the PBC and other lawyers’ bodies before finalising it.

He added that the Senate had also proposed abolishing the Intra Court Appeal (ICA) system which would reduce the burden on the high courts.

Published in Dawn, February 6th, 2016