Computerising Judiciary
The legislative makes the rules. The executive governs by those rules. The judiciary ensures the rightness of the rules and also of governance and fills in the gaps left by the other two to build and sustain the rule of law en route to the fashioning of a just society. This is the ideal basal arrangement of a modern tripodic state. For the functions it must discharge under this arrangement, the judiciary must have the right capacity, in terms of manpower, infrastructure organisation and overall power. The history of our judiciary is one distinguished by both incapacity in many areas to carry out its charge and under-capacity in all. This has resulted in a general fall in the quality of its functioning. Quality apart, this has led to the creation of a veritable Augean stables of hundreds of thousands of undecided cases in backlog. To clean this stable the judiciary will be needing some extra and more than Herculean capacity.
It was very imaginative and enlightened of the World Bank to give this prime need of ours a serious thought and come offering a bale-out. A five-member all-star advisory body headed by Justice Habibur Rahman is soon to report to government their assessment of the needful. We like to put in a piece of counsel both for the advisers and the government. We have no doubt the recommendations will take care of the many inadequacies in the current capacity of our judiciary - mostly related to manning and infrastructural support, warranted all the way by a population that has about doubled in six decades. No doubt putting in more of both men and material will be the main thrust of the proposed capacity building. What we propose is something that, on the contrary, will economise rather than expand the inputs of the system.
We suggest wholesale computerisation of the establishments as also the processes of the judiciary. This will save time and space and add immeasurably to the efficiency of the system. True, an initial mighty push will be necessary to enter the contents of hundreds of tons of important documents into the floppy discs. But once done this will be a awfully nice little cozy corner of the system.
For all latest news, follow The Daily Star's Google News channel.
Comments