Justice denied and delayed

 “I wonder if our fiercely independent chief justice has any time to spare from his judicial activism to look into the huge backlog of cases that has built up over the years, and the impact it has on our society and our economy.” As the Supreme Court struggles valiantly to deal with such knotty issues as Musharraf’s controversial National Reconciliation Ordinance and the 18th Amendment, its backlog of pending cases has grown to 17,500. But compared to the provincial high courts, where some 150,000 cases are awaiting judgment, it is a model of efficiency. Going down to the lower courts, a recent news item in this paper informed us that some 1.1 million cases are clogging the system. One reason the Taliban takeover of Swat last year was initially welcomed by many locals was that they...

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