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 delays include frequent adjournments, shortages of judicial officers, inadequate process serving, improper working environments, poor record-keeping facilities, and few resources to run the courts.
Justice, obviously, is not a priority for Pakistan’s rulers. It is not surprising then that the World Justice Project, which issues an annual report on the rule of law in various countries, ranked Pakistan 130th out of 143 countries in 2025. Pakistan was thus among the 14 lowest-ranked countries for adherence to the rule of law.
Accountability, quite obviously, is a fantasy.
The situation, and the mental picture of thousands and thousands of files piled high with millions of people awaiting justice, is reminiscent of Charles Dickens’ Bleak House, which tells the story of a case that went on for decades. Portions of the opening paragraph read: “Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city.”
Fog in Dickens’ narrative stands not simply for the weather phenomenon but also for the murky opacities of a convoluted justice system. More appropriately, a parallel could be drawn with the smog that often settles over Pakistani cities.
Smog — a consequence of environmental impurities and societal apathy — has nowhere to go so it suspends itself over human life and can be enumerated in the millions of untended files pushed from hearing to hearing. Sometimes a judge is unavailable, sometimes the lawyers are absent. The emphasis is on everyone except the poor, hapless souls who imagined that justice was a possibility.
The smog, of course, is a metaphor, but it points to lived truths about life in Pakistan. If you are an ordinary person, you live a life on the defensive. When you leave your house, you carry only hope and a prayer. If something goes wrong — your parked car gets hit by a passing truck, your phone is stolen, someone attacks you — you realise just how vulnerable you are. No one will replace your car or your phone, and if your attacker can bribe law enforcers with a bigger pile of cash than you can offer to have them file an FIR, then no one will care about that either. Accountability, quite obviously, is a fantasy.
All this illustrates how the inability to count on a functioning legal system creates a contor-
ted society that functions according to the crudest calculations of power. The inability to obtain justice does not simply impede your ability to recover money owed to you or resolve an inheritance dispute. It also means that in any interaction, calculations are made about who has more power and who has less. If a middle-class person has the misfortune of getting into a dispute with someone very wealthy, it is not law that will determine the outcome; it is power.
Solutions like model courts and alternative dispute resolution mechanisms have been thrown at the problem. These have not resolved the underlying structural weaknesses. Pakistan’s courts do not fail simply because there is a need for more courts or another mechanism for resolving disputes.
They fail, the argument goes, because powerful Pakistanis — those who draw their power from wealth or brute force — do not believe in the rule of law.
The consequence is a legal system that serves as a gloss to disguise the crimes of the powerful while the weak remain cowed and tortured by the failures of a sham system.
The writer is an attorney teaching constitutional law and political philosophy.
Published in Dawn, October 17th, 2026