Most Pakistanis prefer to settle cases out of court rather than hiring lawyers and go to court. When a man finds that someone has occupied his plot of land, he knows that it will take many years for the courts to decide in his favor. If he wins in the lower court, the occupier will go into appeal in the higher court and then to the Supreme Court, and by the time he finally gets back his plot he will be a very old man (if he hasn't died in the meantime).
I saw how excruciatingly slow the system works when my uncle Haroon Kasam died in 2002 and his siblings filed a case against his widow to surrender all his property (which she had forced him to register in her name). It's been almost twenty years and only a few hearings have been held so far. The lawyer for the widow told me that he will go to the Supreme Court if the High Court decides against his client, and all the claimants would probably be dead by the time the judgement is pronounced. He was right, all my late uncle's siblings have died in the past twenty years and in another ten years some of their children (myself included) will also be gone.
So it's no wonder why most people (particularly in the rural areas) prefer to get their litigation problems solved by the archaic "jirga" system (where sometimes an accused killer has to walk on burning cinders of coal to prove his innocence). The only way to restore confidence in our justice system is to make it mandatory for civil cases to be decided in not more than three to four months. If judges take longer without valid reasons, they should be penalized. And of course, judges should not be allowed to go on vacation every year for three months.
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