Imaginary justice |
ON any given day, newspaper headlines across Pakistan are littered with updates on court cases. These usually fall into two categories. The first are updates on cases involving political leaders in prison: so and so is brought out for a hearing, so and so has a case stayed. The second category comprises criminal cases that have, largely owing to social media, attracted some attention. Many involve female victims who were killed or raped, sometimes both. Dead women are a topic of interest in Pakistan — much more so than living women.
There is, however, a third category of cases. These belong to ordinary people — everyday folk who, often erroneously, imagine that Pakistan’s court system can actually deliver justice. The statistics are alarming. According to the Law and Justice Commission of Pakistan, more than 2.2 million cases were pending in Pakistani courts at the end of December 2025. Most of these are civil cases, and if you are unlucky enough to have to file one, you may wait years, sometimes decades, for a final resolution. An entire generation can be conceived, born and raised before your inheritance dispute with your siblings is resolved.
According to one research paper that analysed the backlog, reasons for........