The New Nation - Internet Edition

Hundreds of thousands of cases have been pending in the courts of Bangladesh for years. The unusual delay in giving the final judgment on a case, and the similar lengthy process spent on its appeal and revision bring no redress to the litigants. The sheer costs of bearing with such a long litigation process is also a serious mater in most cases for the plaintiffs and the defendants. A bill was supposed to be piloted in the last parliament which was designed to speed up the functioning of the courts in general. But it has not been heard of ever since the news of its preparation . A report in this paper sometime ago quoted the Chief Justice as suggesting that lawyers should spend more time in the courts to ease the backlog of cases. While there is merit in this suggestion, it should be obvious to all stakeholders that faster setlement of cases calls for capacity building and systemic changes in the judiciary itself. Reforms need to be specially carried out in different tiers of the judicial system to this end.

Outdated laws, insufficient number of judges and support staff at different levels, burden the country's legal system. Poor ways of keeping and retrieving records in the courthouses encourage corrupt practices. A foreign funded programme to upgrade the judiciary in these respects appears not to have made much headway.

The grave lapses in the legal system were revealed last year in a roundtable in which it was disclosed that 1,028 people in the country had been languishing in jail without trial for two years. This was a stark admission of facts about how severely violated human rights can be in a seting like Bangladesh. The poor are specially and extremely vulnerable to such violation of their basic rights due to their poverty and inability to access the judicial system.

It is also likely that these people are not knowledgeable about their own human rights or do not have financial means to appoint lawyers to move for their release or bail in the interim period till their cases come to courts. Ordinarily, the state should have provided legal assistance to them free of charge to complete the cases against them. . The time consuming adjudication could be for various reasons viz. delay in submiting charge-sheets after proper investigation, the overwhelmed conditions of the courts with too many cases and insufficient legal capacities to try the above cases in time. But whatever the reasons, these unfortunate persons were made to suffer internment and all the sufferings thereof, without a legal basis for the same. Government has been provisioning a legal aid system for the poor to access justice. But it has very limited availability and application which means that poor people generally continue to be very frustrated in having proper access to the legal system.

The interim government has created high expectations by addressing many issues of great significance for Bangladesh and its people. It is, therefore, expected to turn its atention to the very pressing need of carrying out effective reforms in the legal spheres.