In Pakistan’s courts, justice is a gamble the poor can’t afford – where lawyers always profit, judges never lose,and only the victim pays the price.

No rhetoric here. This is the lived experience of millions who engage with the legal system only to find that it operates not as a safeguard but as a fortress that protects those inside it while keeping the injured, the weak and the voiceless outside.

When a citizen seeks justice, they step into a structure that is systematically rigged against them. The lawyer who represents them bears no financial risk if the case is lost. Whether the client wins or loses, whether the case takes two months or two decades, lawyers collect their fees. Delay, in fact, becomes a source of income. The longer the case, the more appearances, the more billings. There is no obligation to disclose success rates, no performance audits, and no malpractice liability. A lawyer can mislead a client, overpromise results and underperform without any professional penalty. In this system, justice is not a service but a business – and delay is its most reliable product.

The judge, too, operates with impunity. If a judge issues a poor or biased ruling, there is no consequence. Even when a decision is overturned on appeal, there is no stain on the judge’s record, no deduction in rank, no accountability. Judges in Pakistan are not evaluated on their reversal rates or the quality of their reasoning. They are promoted by seniority, often shielded from public scrutiny. The result is a culture of insulation, where those entrusted with enormous moral responsibility are spared the burden of consequence.

And yet, those consequences fall squarely on the shoulders of the litigant. A faulty ruling can cost them property, liberty, livelihood or all three. But the system takes no note. No one is held responsible for the ruin of a life.

The situation becomes even more disturbing when the courts are used not for redress, but for retribution. Legal processes are frequently weaponised by the powerful. The court becomes an arena not for justice but for harassment. A stay order can freeze a business project or an important transaction. A petition can be filed to block a reform. A defamation suit can be used to silence a journalist. The law becomes a tool not of protection, but of obstruction. This weaponisation of procedure is a function of how the system is designed: opaque, unaccountable and manipulable.

We are told the judiciary is neutral, above politics, a final arbiter of fairness. But as legal scholars like Mark Tushnet have shown, courts are never above politics. In fact, they reflect it. Judges are shaped by their institutional surroundings and the political currents that elevate them. Richard Posner, like many Chicago economists and lawyers, argued that judges, like all people, respond to incentives. They are not monks; they are ordinary people with ambitions, constraints and preferences. When we pretend otherwise, we shield them from accountability while denying the reality of judicial fallibility.

Even the noblest conceptions of the law – like those advanced by Ronald Dworkin, who believed in law as moral interpretation – require institutions to be structured around integrity. But integrity is not built into Pakistani legal institutions. There is no mechanism that requires lawyers or judges to bear the cost of failure. No process evaluates the quality of justice delivered. There is only inertia, a system that protects itself while draining the life from those it claims to serve.

This imbalance has rendered the legal system structurally unjust. Everyone inside the system – judges, lawyers, institutions and the gatekeeper elite – bears no risk. The only person exposed is the one who came to seek justice. This cruelty masked by ritual must end.

To rebuild trust in the judiciary, we must rebalance the burden of risk. All those who operate within the legal system must share in the consequences of its failure. We must begin by tracking and publishing judicial performance: reversal rates, case durations and complaint records. Lawyers must be required to disclose fees transparently, carry malpractice insurance and face sanctions for misconduct.

Litigants must be protected through legal aid, simplified procedures and fee-shifting rules that discourage frivolous litigation. Most of all, we must create independent oversight bodies with real teeth – not to undermine judicial independence, but to restore judicial integrity.

Justice, if it is to be meaningful, cannot be a one-sided gamble. It cannot be a process where only the victim pays. A just legal system is one where responsibility is mutual, where power is constrained,and where those who act in the name of justice are held accountable for the consequences of their decisions.

In Pakistan, we have not built such a system. We have built a fortress where the legal elite live without fear of consequence while the citizen pleads from the gate. Until that changes, we have laws, sometimes or often self-serving, but not a system of justice to preserve rule of law.

The writer is a former deputy chairman of the Planning Commission. He tweets/posts @Nadeemhaque and his Youtube account is @SIAlytics

Note: This article first appeared in The News International on July 15, 2025.