ISLAMABAD: Lahore High Court (LHC) Chief Justice (CJ) Syed Mansoor Ali Shah has sought help from apex lawyers’ bodies, including the Pakistan Bar Council (PBC), to stamp out the rampant practice of observing strikes in district courts, which he said had virtually rendered the justice sector “dysfunctional”.

“You cannot imagine how litigants suffer when around 600,000 cases could not be taken up due to 948 strikes over a three-month period, from January to March this year,” the LHC CJ regretted.

Justice Shah was speaking to a select group of senior bar leaders, including PBC Vice Chairman Ahsan Bhoon, office-bearers from different bar associations and LHC judges at a Rawalpindi hotel the other day.

Talking to Dawn, Mr Bhoon admitted that the LHC CJ was not wrong, but hastened to add that neither the PBC, nor the Punjab Bar Council, had given any strike calls this year, or the year before.

To end the practice of individual strike calls by smaller lawyer bodies, Mr Bhoon said he was contemplating a meeting of all provincial bar councils, Chief Justice of Pakistan Mian Saqib Nisar and provincial chief justices to frame rules and guidelines where any strike called without the prior consent of PBC or provincial bar councils would be treated as misconduct.

Saying that he would not get the opportunity to address such senior lawyers again, Justice Shah regretted that “third-party interests” were behind most of the strikes called by smaller bars over minor issues.

He illustrated his point by saying that courts had recently been closed over everything from the recent Sargodha murders to the worsening political situation in Turkey and from the anti-Muslim policies of US President Donald Trump to something happening in India.

If something happened in the world, there would be a strike in Bhakkar district, Justice Shah regretted, wondering what international relations had to do with local bar associations.

To substantiate, the LHC CJ cited the example of Chichawatni, where lawyers called for a week-long strike until a judge of the subordinate judiciary was not transferred. The only fault of the judge concerned, the chief justice deplored, was that he had not allowed a local lawyer’s munshi (office assistant) to argue a case in his absence.

The strike left the seven judges in Chichawatni without work for at least a week, even though they had no hand in the matter, the CJ observed, adding that now lawyers had started issuing three-day, four-day or a week-long strike calls on the basis of two-liner messages that did not cite any reasons.

The LHC CJ, who has developed an instant reporting and monitoring system and keeps close liaison with the subordinate judiciary through WhatsApp, highlighted that every day, the aggregate cost of running and maintaining a subordinate court runs into Rs30,000, or Rs750 per case. This means that an aggregate of Rs450 million goes down the drain when not a single case is heard.

Giving further figures, he said the ordeal was tough for litigants, who had to spend, on average, Rs640 for each visit. If the amount is calculated for the 948 strikes that took place this year alone, a whopping Rs380 million in litigants’ money was wasted, Justice Shah lamented.

Published in Dawn, May 7th, 2017