Khuzair Raheem<\/p>\n
As of the end of last year, Pakistan\u2019s courts were sitting on roughly 2.3 million unresolved cases. Nearly 83% were pending in the district judiciary; the remainder was spread across the high courts, the Federal Shariat Court and the Supreme Court.
\nThe SC\u2019s share hovered in the mid-50,000s, a few percentage points of national pendency at most.
\nWithin the superior courts, constitutional work is concentrated rather than dominant: at the Lahore High Court, for example, writ and constitutional matters are about 84,000 out of roughly 179,000 pending cases, close to half of that court\u2019s own docket, yet that entire stock is still a sliver next to the millions of cases stuck below.
\nPakistan\u2019s backlog remains, by any measure, overwhelmingly a trial-court problem.
\nAgainst that data, parliament has moved with unusual speed. In a short span, a constitutional amendment that creates a Federal Constitutional Court (FCC), shifts constitutional jurisdiction away from the existing Supreme Court and touches sensitive questions of state design has been pushed through, with little committee scrutiny or public engagement.
\nThe government\u2019s explanation is simple. The SC, we are told, is drowning in constitutional and \u2018political\u2019 litigation, which has crowded out ordinary appeals. The FCC is offered as the solution: it will take on the constitutional load; the Supreme Court will focus on its appellate role; and the pendency will fall.
\nThe statement of objects and reasons to the Constitution (Twenty-seventh Amendment) Act, 2025 says as much, blaming an \u201cincreasing number of constitutional petitions\u201d for delays in regular cases and promising that a specialised court will \u201csignificantly reduce pendency\u201d.
\nThat narrative has already been challenged from within the system. Former chief justice Jawwad S Khawaja has taken the amendment back to the court he once led, warning that it will weaken the state, unsettle the separation of powers and erode the consensus around the 1973 constitution.
\nSince then, the debate has moved from draft to fact. President Asif Ali Zardari has now signed the 27th Amendment into law, creating the new office of the chief of defence forces and establishing the FCC as an operative reality rather than a proposal.
\nIn response, three senior judges, SC justices Syed Mansoor Ali Shah and Athar Minallah, and Lahore High Court Justice Shams Mehmood Mirza have resigned in protest, describing the amendment as an assault on the constitution and on judicial independence.
\nThe question for this piece, however, is narrower: if the claim is that the FCC is about backlog relief for the ordinary litigant, do the numbers support that claim?
\nThe SC\u2019s pending caseload has risen from roughly the mid-20,000s in the mid-2010s to around 40,000 by 2018 and past 50,000 by 2021 into the mid-50,000s in 2024\u201325.
\nSet against the nationwide stock already noted above, this makes the apex court a small but visible pocket of congestion rather than the epicentre of delay.
\nConstitutional work, even where it clusters, is numerically marginal once you zoom out from the superior courts to the system as a whole. Even in high courts where writ and constitutional matters occupy a large share of the local docket, that entire layer sits on top of a system in which more than 2.3 million cases are pending, the vast majority in the trial courts.
\nOn any realistic view, the SC\u2019s constitutional workload therefore sits well below even one or two per cent of the national total; even if every case on its list were re-badged as \u2018constitutional\u2019, it would still barely dent the overall numbers.
\nThe court itself has acknowledged that a large portion of its docket consists of review petitions rather than fresh constitutional challenges. And in its own case law on special courts, it has warned that creating new forums or simply adding judges does not cure delay; the real work lies in case and court management, especially in the lower tiers.
\nTaken together, the data and the doctrine point in the same direction: Pakistan\u2019s backlog is overwhelmingly a trial-court phenomenon. The problem the FCC is meant to solve is numerically marginal.
\nUnder the 27th Amendment, the FCC is designed to exercise original constitutional jurisdiction \u2014including federal\u2013provincial disputes and many fundamental-rights questions while hearing constitutional appeals from the high courts.
\nThe existing SC is recast as largely an appellate tribunal for other work. Ironically, even if one assumes, very generously, that a full one-third of current Supreme Court pendency is \u201cconstitutional\u201d, we are dealing with perhaps twenty thousand such cases in a system of more than 2.3 million. On that assumption, the FCC\u2019s core field of operation covers well under one per cent of the pending caseload in Pakistan.
\nNor will the FCC simply inherit existing matters and work through them quietly. New courts generate their own litigation \u2013 jurisdictional contests between the Supreme Court, FCC and high courts, challenges to composition and appointments, fresh layers of appeal and review. A body created and justified as a relief mechanism for the \u201cordinary litigant\u201d is, by design, aimed at the smallest and most elite slice of the docket.
\nAll this might still be defensible if the FCC were cheap. It is not. The SC\u2019s budget for 2023\u201324 is in the region of Rs3.5 billion, largely consumed by salaries and allowances.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Khuzair Raheem As of the end of last year, Pakistan\u2019s courts were sitting on roughly 2.3 million unresolved cases. Nearly 83% were pending in the district judiciary; the remainder was spread across the high courts, the Federal Shariat Court and the Supreme Court. The SC\u2019s share hovered in the mid-50,000s, a few percentage points of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[13759],"class_list":{"0":"post-515342","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-article","7":"tag-khuzair-raheem"},"yoast_head":"\n