LAHORE: The Punjab Subordinate Judiciary Service Tribunal, a statutory forum to decide service matters of judicial officers, has [unprecedentedly] held its sittings continuously for five working days of a week in a row from Nov 15 to 19 ever since its establishment in 1991.

However, record shows that some of the service appeals pending on the docket of the tribunal were filed over 20 years ago and some of the appeals faded away due to death or superannuation of the appellants/judicial officers.

The Lahore High Court (LHC) has recently issued a notification regarding the restoration of a civil judge, Khalid Farooq, nine months after the tribunal allowed his appeal against the termination in 2011.

The administration committee of the LHC, comprising the chief justice and six next most senior judges, is the competent authority for the judicial officers, which decides their fate in disciplinary matters like dismissal, removal from service, compulsory retirement, reprimand, reinstatement, expunction of adverse remarks in ACRs and promotions.

The composition of the tribunal is three sitting judges of the LHC and it is empowered to examine the validity of decisions of the administration committee, which comprises seven senior justices of the court.

Every new chief justice of the LHC, upon assumption of his office, nominates three judges of his choice to form the three-member tribunal. At present Justice Mirza Viqas Rauf heads the tribunal as its chairman with Justice Sajid Mahmood Sethi and Justice Sarfraz Dogar its members.

It is learnt that the tribunal used to hold its sittings rarely in the distant past and that too briefly only on Fridays because of which a huge backlog of service appeals by judicial officers have accumulated.

The tribunal remains dysfunctional for pretty longer spans of time due to preoccupation of its chairman or any of its two members in other judicial assignments, unavailability of any of the members at the principal seat Lahore and also during summer and winter vacation.

Justice Rauf, the present chairman of the tribunal, has been performing judicial work at the Rawalpindi bench for months. However, he was recently posted at the principal seat where he conducted sittings of the tribunal for five consecutive days.

A lawyer, whose several cases are pending with the tribunal, told Dawn that the last time the tribunal worked regularly was seven years ago when former justice Farrukh Irfan Khan as its chairman and Justice Abdul Sattar Asghar (also now retired) and Justice Muhammad Ameer Bhatti, the current chief justice as he then was, being its members, held continuous sittings of the forum for a couple of months from April to July 2014 on every Friday.

The tribunal had particularly ordered the service appeals to be fixed in a chronological order when the Supreme Court took stock of the appalling situation while hearing an appeal filed by an aggrieved judicial officer in a case during 2013.

A cursory examination of the first of its kind week-long cause list of the tribunal from Nov 15 to 19, available with Dawn, shows that 30 oldest appeals of judicial officers of different ranks i.e. civil judges/district and sessions judges having been instituted between years 2000 and 2018 in chronological order are pending adjudication.

A lawyer said only a handful of the oldest appeals could be decided by the tribunal because the lawyers representing the respondent departmental authority succeeded in seeking adjournments on one pretext or the other.

The inordinate delay in disposal of the appeals by the tribunal causes anxiety and depression among the judicial officers.

A lawyer told Dawn that his client/judicial officer sacked in 2004 was reinstated in 2014 and his subsequent appeal filed in 2015 for the grant of service/financial back benefits had been decided in his favour lately but he was yet to reap the benefits of his reinstatement.

In yet another case, a judge’s appeal filed in 2003 against his termination was allowed by the tribunal in 2014. Subsequently, he also succeeded in winning his appeal for grant of back benefits in 2018, however, the authorities at the LHC have not complied with the tribunal’s decision regarding the grant of benefits.

His fresh appeal for implementation of earlier judgment has also been pending with the tribunal since 2018 and it is unlikely to anticipate as to when that appeal would be decided.

The appellant judicial officers, whose cases were taken up in chronological order during the last sitting of the tribunal are hoping against the hope of getting their voices heard at least by tribunal, that has at least broken the barriers of holding Friday-alone sittings.

However, no fresh cause list of the tribunal has been issued so far, stalling the momentum generated during the previous continuous working.

Published in Dawn, December 2nd, 2021