Importance of legal reforms
Friday, 4 April 2008
Hundreds of thousands of cases have been pending in the lower courts of Bangladesh for years. The slow process of giving final judgement on a case, the similar lengthy process spent on its revision or appeal, etc., mean that sometimes the litigants have no use for the judgements when the same are declared. The sheer costs of bearing with such a long litigation process is also a serious matter 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 a section of the media 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 settlement 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.
The country's legal system is burdened by outdated laws, insufficient number of judges and support staff at different levels, irregularities within the courts and poor ways of keeping and retrieving records in the court houses that only aid sloth, delay and inefficiency. A donor-funded programme to upgrade the judiciary in these respects appears not to have made much headway. The lapses in the legal system were revealed last year in a roundtable discussion where 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 setting like Bangladesh where the poor are specially and extremely vulnerable to such violation of their basic rights due to their poverty and hence inability to access the judicial system in their rightful interests.
It is very likely that these people are mainly from poor sections of society who are either not knowledgeable about their human rights or do not have financial strengths to appoint lawyers to move for their release or bail in the interim period until their cases come to courts. Ordinarily, the state should have conducted judicial proceedings against them or even provided legal assistance to them free of charge to complete the cases against them and to keep only in jail those who would be legally convicted. The lack of adjudication could be for various reasons : dithering in submitting police charge-sheets after proper investigations, the overwhelmed conditions of the courts with too many cases and, therefore, 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. The 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. This interim government has created high expectations by addressing many issues like that of separation of the judiciary from the executive which are of great significance for Bangladesh and its people. It is, therefore, also expected to turn its attention to the very pressing need of carrying out sweeping and effective reforms in the legal spheres for expediting the process for disposal of a huge backlog of cases.
The country's legal system is burdened by outdated laws, insufficient number of judges and support staff at different levels, irregularities within the courts and poor ways of keeping and retrieving records in the court houses that only aid sloth, delay and inefficiency. A donor-funded programme to upgrade the judiciary in these respects appears not to have made much headway. The lapses in the legal system were revealed last year in a roundtable discussion where 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 setting like Bangladesh where the poor are specially and extremely vulnerable to such violation of their basic rights due to their poverty and hence inability to access the judicial system in their rightful interests.
It is very likely that these people are mainly from poor sections of society who are either not knowledgeable about their human rights or do not have financial strengths to appoint lawyers to move for their release or bail in the interim period until their cases come to courts. Ordinarily, the state should have conducted judicial proceedings against them or even provided legal assistance to them free of charge to complete the cases against them and to keep only in jail those who would be legally convicted. The lack of adjudication could be for various reasons : dithering in submitting police charge-sheets after proper investigations, the overwhelmed conditions of the courts with too many cases and, therefore, 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. The 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. This interim government has created high expectations by addressing many issues like that of separation of the judiciary from the executive which are of great significance for Bangladesh and its people. It is, therefore, also expected to turn its attention to the very pressing need of carrying out sweeping and effective reforms in the legal spheres for expediting the process for disposal of a huge backlog of cases.