The strategies that were presented before a meeting of the Supreme Court judges on Sunday propose to introduce, for the first time, a panel system to dispense justice, judgment within a fixed time period and management of hearing, among others, with sole objective to provide speedy justice, according to Til Prasad Shrestha, spokesperson for the Supreme Court.
Under the panel system, as proposed by a four-member apex court committee headed by Justice Min Bahadur Rayamajee, there will be different panels of judges to take up allotted number of cases.
For instance, a panel of judges will hear only corruption cases while other panels will specialize on constitutional, commercial, civil, criminal cases or writ petitions.
“We have proposed the panel system because it has been effective in India, the Philippines and other countries to deliver speedy justice,” Shrestha, who is also the member secretary of the committee, told myrepublica.com.
If adopted, the panel system, will replace the existing old system in which the chief justice assigns cases to judges on a daily basis.
At present country’s justice system is characterized by delay. Though the existing laws require the Supreme Court and the appellate courts to decide cases within six months, they have not been able to do the same.
According to a study of the Supreme Court, the apex court and the appellate are taking one and a half years on an average to finalize a case and the number of backlogs cases is rising every year. The backlog cases in the Supreme Court alone are 12,965.
The panel has further proposed to categorize the cases in the Supreme Court into four categories so that they are disposed off within a given deadline. For instance, simple or pity cases will be categorized under “simple track” and finalized within a certain deadline that will be worked out by the Full Court.
Besides, the Full Court will also define what kind of cases should be treated as “simple”, “ordinary”, “complex” and “more complex”. The deadline to finalize the cases will differ as per the category they belong to.
Another proposed strategy says that lawyers should be given only limited time during hearing. It is the general practice in the judiciary that a lawyer can take as much time as possible to defend his client during hearings, which often lead cases to take more time and delay in justice delivery.
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