ISLAMABAD: Judges of Lahore’s district courts have drawn the attention of Chief Justice of Pakistan Mian Saqib Nisar to the boorish and rowdy behaviour of lawyers and warned that the judicial system may collapse if this menace is not curbed.

The judges have sent an “anonymous”, one-page complaint to the chief justice, requesting him to visit the district courts of Lahore at the earliest to personally observe the pathetic conditions in which the judges of the lower judiciary are dispensing justice.

The complaint has demanded immediate deployment of Rangers at the district and sessions courts of Lahore for the protection of judicial officers from the lawyers. If Rangers personnel are deployed for the security of the district judges, the complaint says, the backlog of the cases will be reduced at least to half from the current pendency within a year.

Reacting to the alarming situation, Chairman of the Judicial and Electoral Reforms Committee of the Pakistan Bar Council (PBC) Raheel Kamran Sheikh, who has also received a copy of the complaint, has forwarded the complaint to PBC members.

He told Dawn that he would call a meeting to discuss the situation about the working environment of the lower judiciary, particularly in Lahore, in the background of this complaint.

Call for deployment of Rangers at the district and sessions court

Mr Sheikh had remained the most vocal member of the bar council on issues regarding lawyers’ indiscipline in the past.

In the complaint, the district judges have stated that they have been carrying out their duties honestly and devotedly but in the current environment where hooliganism on part of the lawyers is on the rise, it has become extremely difficult for them to fulfill their duties independently.

It has become order of the day, that district judges are pressurised to get decisions of the lawyers’ choice, the complaint regrets. And in case of insistence to follow the law, the district judges are coerced through protests, strikes, hurling of abuses and even locking down of the courtrooms.

Sadly no disciplinary action has ever been taken against lawyers, the complaint bemoans. Instead judges are compelled to compromise their integrity and conscience in the name of exigencies.

Judges are even verbally threatened to quietly become part of the “rotten system” instead of becoming “Mao Zedong — a famous Chinese communist revolutionary leader”, the complaint deplores.

District judges in the given circumstances have become hostage to lawyers but the situation has never been reported to senior judicial officers other than the sessions judges.

In case no concrete step is taken to discourage the boorish behaviour of lawyers and the dignity of the district judges is not protected, the courts will be kept on being locked down, judges will be forced to avoid dispensing justice and eventually the entire judicial system will collapse, the complaint fears.

In May last year, the former chief justice of the Lahore High Court, Justice Mansoor Ali Shah, who now has been elevated to the Supreme Court, had also asked lawyers’ apex bodies, including the PBC, to intervene and discourage the malaise of rampant strikes by district bar members that has virtually rendered the justice system dysfunctional.

The former chief justice had also produced statistics by stating how litigants suffered since 600,000 could not be taken up because of 948 strikes in just three months from January to March in 2017.

He had also deplored that the courts were closed even because a local “Pir” — a spiritual healer — killed his disciples, if the political situation in Turkey went awry or in protest against US President Donald Trump’s policies on the Muslim World or some happening in India.

Published in Dawn, May 23rd, 2018