ISLAMABAD – District Complaint Cells have been established followingMonday’s meeting of the Chief Justice of Pakistan (CJP) Asif Saeed Khosa,who announced the establishment of model courts at district levelthroughout the country for conducting the trials on daily basis so thatspeedy justice to the public could be ensured and the massive backlog ofcases could be reduced.
Thereby, session courts have been restricted from hearing petitions beforefiling of cases.
Under new rules, a litigant will be required to appear before ‘DistrictComplaint Cell’ that will be headed by the Investigations SP of eachdistrict shall act as the focal person for the police at the district leveland shall liaise with the process cell.
Besides, more than 25,000 applications filed in district and session courtsof Lahore have been transferred to the District Complaint Cell while thecourts have been restricted to proceed under Section 22 A/22 B of the Codeof Criminal Procedure (CrPC).
These changes have been observed following the meeting of the NationalJudicial (Policy Making) Committee (NJPMC) at the Supreme Court building.The committee was presided over by the chief justice and attended by chiefjustices of the Federal Shariat Court and high courts. CJP Khosa hadexplained that Article 37 (d) of the Constitution requires the state toprovide expeditious and inexpensive justice thus under the light of thisprinciple model trial courts will be established in the country to carryout trials daily.
NJPMC Secretary Dr Mohammad Raheem Awan briefed the meeting that from Jan1, 2017 to Feb 28, 2019, a total number of 614,307 cases under section 22A/22 B CrPC were filed in the district judiciary throughout the country.During the same time period 47,029 cases under similar provisions werefiled in the high courts.
The NJPMC secretary further briefed the committee that during 2019 tilldate, a total of 25,426 complaints have been disposed of by complaintredressal centres.
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The attendance of witnesses would be ensured through special processservers.
The investigations in-charge of each police station shall be responsiblefor the production of all witnesses (except medical witnesses) and caseproperty.
For the timely production of medical witnesses, the respective healthsecretaries would be approached.
Furthermore, it was informed that a monitoring and evaluation cell underthe supervision of the chief justice of Pakistan to oversee the executionof the initiative would be set-up. He further stated that the progress ofthe said initiative would be reviewed after every two months.
