ISLAMABAD: The Senate converted itself into a committee for the first time in the country’s parliamentary history on Wednesday and discussed various proposals floated by members to improve the judicial system.

The decision to constitute the committee of the whole house had been taken on May 18 after senators during a debate on the motion moved by MQM’s Tahir Mashhadi expressed no-confidence and dissatisfaction over the existing judicial system and called for steps to provide inexpensive and speedy justice to people.

Know more: Senate opens itself to general public

Chairman Raza Rabbani presided over the meeting which was open for media coverage.

The committee decided to seek proposals from representatives of lawyers’ bodies, including bar associations of high courts and Supreme Court and bar councils of the four provinces and human rights bodies.

The members decided to seek proposals from eminent law experts and lawyers, including Asma Jahangir, Wasim Sajjad, S.M. Zafar, Khalid Anwar, Abdul Hafeez Pirzada and Majida Rizvi.

The committee also decided to seek comments and proposals from the general public through a drop box created on the Senate’s official website under the recently-launched public petition system.

On a proposal of PPP’s Farhatullah Babar, the meeting agreed to form three sub-committees to give reports separately on legislative, judicial and administrative reforms for ensuring speedy and inexpensive justice.

Mr Babar advised against pursuing too heavy and too ambitious legal reforms agenda, saying that voluminous reports of various reforms commissions in the past had only ended in the dustbin.

He said the first step towards ensuring speedy and inexpensive justice must be provision of justice where none existed and called for a legislation to bring intelligence agencies under the ambit of law to provide some justice to forcibly disappeared persons.

He said that according to the Commission on Enforced Disappearances sufficient evidence existed that agencies had apprehended a number of missing persons.

Published in Dawn, May 21st, 2015

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