LAHORE: The Lahore High Court (LHC) has ruled that a claimant cannot be barred by a limitation for not approaching a statutory forum that the government had not yet constituted.
A division bench comprising Justice Mirza Viqas Rauf and Justice Anwaar Hussain allowed an appeal filed by Muhammad Farooq Malik under Section 26 of the Punjab Defamation Act, 2024.
The appeal challenged a Jan 13, 2026, order of a defamation tribunal, which had dismissed his claim as time-barred.
The appellant, in person, argued that when the cause of action accrued and he sought enforcement of his right, no defamation tribunal had yet been constituted and there existed no statutory forum before which the claim contemplated by the Act could be instituted.
Therefore, he filed a suit for damages before a civil court on July 28, 2025 and the government notified the tribunals and their territorial jurisdictions on Sept 2.
LHC rules claimant can’t be barred from filing damages suit for not moving an inaccessible statutory forum
The civil court returned the plaint on Nov 6, 2025, and he filed the claim before the tribunal on Nov 13.
On the other hand, the counsel for the respondents submitted that the proceedings having initially been instituted before the civil court ought to have continued before that court.
Justice Hussain, the author of the judgement, observed that the case in hand was not one of a tribunal that existed, but was inaccessible.
Until the notification, he observed, there was no legally constituted tribunal before which the appellant could present a claim.
He noted that the law had created the right and prescribed the remedy, but the executive had not performed the act needed to bring the forum into existence.
The judge held that the guarantee of access to justice, drawn from Articles 4, 9 and 10-A of the Constitution and Supreme Court precedents, is not met by recognising a right while the forum to enforce it does not exist.
The judge also referred to legal maxims“ubi jus ibi remedium”(Where there is a right, there is a remedy) and“lex non cogit ad impossibilia” (The law does not compel the impossible).
Justice Hussain noted that limitation serves certainty and finality and constitutional guarantees cannot rewrite a clear statutory period. But, he said, it distinguished between delay caused by a litigant and inability created by the statute’s own framework.
He observed that the appellant had not slept over his rights and had gone to the civil court within the period and then approached the tribunal within days of its creation.
Rejecting an argument by the respondents’ counsel, the authoring judge held that Section 10(5), which saves proceedings pending under the repealed Defamation Ordinance, 2002, covers only cases already pending when the Act came into force and does not revive the Ordinance for new filings.
“The law does not reward indolence, but neither does it manufacture default out of diligence,” the judge said.
The bench allowed the appeal and set aside the tribunal’s order.
The bench remitted the matter back to the defamation tribunal for a decision on merit.
Published in Dawn, October 21st, 2026
