Pakistan’s awful judicial system

"If the Supreme Court can swiftly open court to study the ruling of a deputy speaker, then it should listen to the case of Faisalabad abduction exclusively on emergency basis but again, it is all about priorities"

We have many problems in Pakistan and a terrible judicial system is one of them. Anything can happen in this country. Some men can coerce a couple into sex for the sake of their pleasure and film the process. Teens can sexually assault a cat and film it. A bus conductor can rape a woman and get away with it. Three railway employees can rape a woman in a train and will not face any trial. Welcome to Pakistan.

We don’t hear these kinds of stories from countries like Saudi Arabia, Iran, China, Korea. They have strict laws to prevent the crime. They have brutal capital punishments for criminals. Even though they are criticized by human rights groups for being so cruel, yet they continue to execute the criminals publicly. Resultantly, they have significantly lower crime rates.

This time, a rich ‘papa’s girl’ decided to humiliate a classmate, and her daddy was there to support her. A medical student was kidnapped, beaten and humiliated for the pleasure of this father-daughter duo. As if kidnapping and beating her was not traumatizing enough, they made her lick their shoes as well. They even filmed the entire process themselves. On the filing of an FIR, police quickly arrested both of these criminals for this offence, but they were released just a few hours after the arrest, leaving a large number of citizens offended.

How come these people manage to get out despite it being a high profile case, and it is a high profile case because public was offended and was following the developments. When the entire nation is looking and is outraged at a criminal, the pressure is real. How can the law and order institutions release these criminals when there is a concrete evidence of what these criminals did? Since these are powerful people, it is possible that they’ll harm the victim again but this possibility was ignored as well. The fundamental question is when will this country hold such people accountable?

In Pakistan, people often blame police for the poor law and order situation in the country. They think police is not doing the job properly but if we look closely, it is not the fault of police. It is the fault of judiciary. Police not only identifies the criminals in real time but also arrests them and presents them before court. In most cases, they manage to take out the confession from the criminals along with convincing evidence. In most cases, they do their job perfectly. It is the court, that grants the bail to these criminals and this is the problem.

You can do anything in this country and you know no one can dare to convict you. You can behead Noor Muqadam and get away with it. Police successfully arrested Zahir Jaffar and presented the evidence before court, and since the whole nation was outraged the court ordered death penalty for the criminal (under pressure). But why hasn’t he been executed despite the court order? Because the court didn’t bother to implement its own decision to serve justice.

Now many will argue that the judicial proceedings and the implementation takes time but what we have observed in the last few months suggests otherwise. We saw the Supreme Court actively listening to each and every petition made by a political party. We saw them implementing their decisions on a sitting parliament and reprimand them if they made delay. Supreme Court makes sure that PTI gets justice on time. Yesterday, it issued a notice to the election commission in the foreign funding case. I must say Supreme Court is so active to serve justice to PTI, if only the court were active to provide justice to the citizens as well. If Supreme Court can listen to the concerns of PTI, it should listen to our concerns as well. All those rape cases where criminals admitted their crime, all those cases of land grabbing where the owners are struggling to get their property back, the cases of murder where criminals like Shahrukh Jatoi flash victory signs after the trial, are awaiting and the courts are to be blamed for the delay because the delay gives margin to the criminals.

Majority of these are the cases without any grey area of uncertainty. You have the evidences and witnesses so when it is crystal clear who the culprit is, justice should not be delayed. If the Supreme Court can swiftly open court to study the ruling of a deputy speaker, then it should listen to the case of Faisalabad abduction exclusively on emergency basis but again, it is all about priorities.