For litigants, justice remains a distant dream. Property disputes and corruption cases get delayed again and again or are simply not taken up for years and the ordinary man is deprived of access to precious resources and justice.

According to the most recent numbers, around 22,000 cases are pending in the lower courts of Islamabad, while over 8,000 in the high court.

“I filed a case against a government official with corruption charges, but the case has been hanging for two years and now the official who the case was originally against has moved to an entirely different department. What meaning would a decision on the case have now?” asked one litigant, unwilling to be named.

Many times, court savvy land grabbers use the slow pace of court’s move and take stays to prolong the matter until the litigant agrees for an out-of-court settlement out of sheer frustration.

This is not a new problem; Pakistani courts have gained a reputation for being unable to provide swift justice, but the expectation was that creation of the Islamabad High Court (IHC) in 2010 and shifting more administrative responsibility closer to home will help resolve the building backlog of cases.

Islamabad High Court came into existence by the Islamabad High Court Act of 2010. The Act legislated for the IHC to “consist of a Chief Justice and six other judges to be appointed from the provinces and other territories of Pakistan, in accordance with the Constitution.”

Furthermore, the Act also divided Islamabad into two sessions divisions to allow expansion of administrative capacity and increase administrative efficiency.

However, two years later, the backlog continues to exist and going to court remains a nightmare as their resolution is a matter of years.

Part of the reason is that four of the seven vacancies were never filled until January of this year and the court had been functioning on half capacity of three judges only. Three more have been added this year through transfer of judges from Balochistan, KP and Sindh and that that is helping.

“Right now there are six judges in the high court with one vacant seat since the capacity is of seven judges, but considering the number of cases that are getting filed is so high, I think that this maximum number needs to be increased,” recommended Nayyab Hassan Gardezi, President of IHC Bar Association.

He revealed that around 12,000 cases had been decided in the last year alone and now there were three more judges so the problem of ever piling cases was being address slowly.

However, he pointed out that the problem continued to exist because many of the new judges at both high court and lower court level had been sent by Sindh, Balochistan and KP.

In recent additions, 20 civil judges have been added to the lower judiciary and nine additional sessions judges have also been hired.

“These judges are not familiar with the Punjab High Court laws and are not used to the diverse range of cases a judge in Islamabad has to face so they are having a hard time adjusting,” explained Mr Gardezi.

Raja Aftab, who is also a lawyer in Islamabad, agreed: “The judges who have been hired are not from Punjab but from other provinces so we have a hard time explaining the processes and rules that apply here.”

“But I think that if the number of judges is doubled, the backlog can clear in six months. Mostly cases piled up during the lawyers movement when the whole system came to a halt and cases kept going to pendency,” he added.

According to insiders, Lahore High Court, which has typically been the source of judges for Islamabad territory, has not been cooperative since the establishment of IHC and has refused to provide any judges.In addition, for the lower courts, some of the judges were previously being provided by the Lahore court that was administering all courts in Punjab. But since the establishment of the IHC, these judges have been called back and Islamabad has had trouble filling the required seats.

“According to the Punjab formula, one judge should bear a load of no more than 500 cases. By this standard, we need to have at least 50 more judges,” explained a senior IHC official.

The IHC is taking active steps to hire more judges but the process is taking its time since arranging finances and going through the paperwork takes time.

And IHC has put out advertisements for hiring new judges but the initial process faced some hurdles when the judges were hired only on the basis of interviews. Some objected so now the process is being revised to ensure that potential judges also qualify through an examination system before they are hired.

“Every day, 200 to 250 cases are decided in the lower courts and with more judges this number will increase so more cases will also get transferred to the higher courts,” added Mr Gardezi, arguing that the system needed to be expanded further to allow for the increasing load of cases. And considering the Islamabad High Court Act’s provision of two sessions divisions, such an expansion would be very possible in the future.

“In the long run, this would be good but right now the need is simply for more judges,” concluded Mr Gardezi.