Law, Justice and Parliamentary Affairs Adviser Dr Asif Nazrul said on Saturday that making alternative dispute resolution (ADR) methods mandatory is essential to address the persistent and overwhelming backlog of cases, reports BSS.
The ministry is taking prompt and decisive steps to implement this initiative, he said.
He made these remarks while presiding over a view-exchange meeting organised on the draft of the Legal Aid Act (Amendment) Ordinance 2025 at the conference room of the National Legal Aid Services Organization (NLASO) in the capital's Bailey Road.
Asif Nazrul, also the chairman of the National Governing Board of the NLASO, said the abnormal pressure of cases in the courts not only questions the judicial structure but also the possibility of getting justice.
Mentioning that reducing the pressure of new cases is the need of time, he said that to reduce this pressure, more importance should be given to ADR methods. Therefore, it is important to make the mediation and settlement mandatory before filing a case, he added.
The adviser said that out of the approximately 500,000 cases filed in the courts of Bangladesh every year, only 35,000 cases are resolved through the government legal aid service. Disputes are resolved in legal aid offices with full satisfaction of the parties in 90 percent of the cases, taking only one-tenth of the time required in the court to dispose of a case, he observed.
If the government legal aid programme can be further expanded, made more efficient, and institutionally strengthened, the number of cases resolved through mediation could be increased to 100,000-200,000, he said, adding, achieving this could reduce the number of case filings by 40 percent.
Asif Nazrul mentioned that from the beginning, they have set three targets for the reform process on behalf of the ministry. The first of these is to resolve cases quickly and in the shortest possible time at low cost.