The three-day National Judicial Conference finished here at the Supreme Court on Sunday with a stress on the use of state-of-the-art and contextually relevant information technology (IT) to resolve the widely-known problems within the Pakistani justice system, which have brought it to the brink of disaster. The declaration of the conference, read out by Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, said: “The power of IT should be harnessed in court management and case management to subsequently improve the litigant’s court experience, and to this end the national judicial automation committee should be empowered to play a leading role in conjunction with justice sector IT experts, both in the public and private sector.”
The declaration said a multidimensional approach must be adopted to improve the implementation of policy, taking into account the areas that currently needed to be addressed. It said dialogue between the bench and bar as well as other stakeholders should be encouraged by creating a sense of ownership about the policy. It should be ensured that the trickle-down impact of the policy would be substantive justice rather than a focus on the mere disposal of cases, it said further.
It says public interest litigation would be more successful with separate benches of judges established to hear the human rights cases for a specified time, the involvement of commissions to share the burden of the judiciary, adoption of procedural rules by the Supreme Court to channelise the cases, awareness amongst the legal fraternity to report the cases of human rights violations to high courts, and preliminary inquiries before taking suo motu action.
It said the bench and bar should work in a friendly atmosphere while maintaining a professional distance along with dignity, appreciation and respect for each other, and periodic inter-professional learning workshops should be organised to allow both tiers of the judiciary to vent their grievances and concerns to create better understanding. The declaration stated that the measures of deterrence, prevention and education should be applied to counter corruption, adding that it was necessary to strengthen the surveillance systems of the courts, especially at district level.
Malicious and false accusations against judicial officers should be strictly discouraged and addressed with disciplinary action. It said the bench and bar should formulate and propose credible amendments in the existing laws and rules for Alternate Dispute Resolution (ADR) together, as there was a pressing need for an inexpensive and effective ADR mechanism. Awareness campaigns and programmes must be launched to ensure that the public was aware of the benefits of ADR. Judges should be trained to effectively employ ADR mechanism, it added.
