LAHORE, Sept 4: The Sindh government on Tuesday sought advice from Punjab for establishing prosecution department to improve its judicial system.
The advice was sought by Sindh Law Minister Chaudhry Iftikhar who called on his Punjab counterpart and Prosecution Service Minister Basharat Raja here in the Civil Secretariat.
Punjab is the only province in the country which has established an independent prosecution service under the Access to Justice Programme, creating a new department for the purpose.
Officials said the Sindh law minister explained that Karachi had an excellent prosecution department before the creation of Pakistan which was established under the 1905 Act. The department was run by the Bombay residency but right now it was not delivering mainly because of the slackness of the attorneys.
He said Sindh wanted to benefit from the Punjab experience to improve prosecution rate in the province.
Raja Basharat explained how the new service was created under a law passed by the provincial assembly after much wrangling between the provincial law and home departments, both wanting to administer the service.
Finally, a new department was created to establish the service, allowing for the recruitment of prosecutors in various categories. Eligible district attorneys and inspectors (legal) of the police department were absorbed into the service while the rest of the staff was engaged on contract basis.
The minister explained that as per the requirement of law and Lahore High Court directions, the provincial government was going to recruit around 3,000 prosecutors through the Punjab Public Service Commission which had already been sent a requisition in this regard. The recruitment process will be completed in one year.
The minister also apprised his counterpart of the modus operandi of the new department and the volume of funds being spent to run it.
He said though the department was new and it still required regular prosecutors, it had started giving results, increasing the rate of prosecutions all over the province.
Raja Basharat said the prosecution rate had increased because the prosecutors were now being allotted a limited number of cases. Previously, the attorneys would be allotted certain number of courts, irrespective of the workload, rendering them unable to properly pursue cases.
In a majority of cases, the attorneys would not appear before the courts because of workload or mala fide, allowing undue delay in prosecution or resulting in decision of the cases in favour of the accused.
Now, the minister claimed, the prosecutors were handling a limited number of cases, getting adequate time to prepare their versions and plead them in the courts. Now, more than one prosecutor were appearing in a court and none of them could give any excuse for shirking work.
The minister said under the new arrangement, stay in the department was performance-based, salaries were good and those found not delivering would be removed.
He said the new appointments of prosecutors would be made on contract employment mode, making it easy for the provincial government to remove the inefficient officers from the service without having any legal hurdle.