Siddique Ali Pirzada
BY June 2025, Pakistan’s courts confronted a backlog of approximately 2.27 million cases, while operating with nearly 1,200 fewer judges than the sanctioned strength.
Of these, 361,677 were pending before the superior courts and 1,908,907 before the district judiciary. The Ministry of Law and Justice itself has acknowledged that civil litigation may extend up to 15 years. This is not administrative delay. It is structural incapacity. The system is operating with a throughput fundamentally misaligned with demand, rendering increasingly untenable the assumption that civil disputes must routinely pass through full adversarial adjudication. Reform discourse in Pakistan remains anchored in incrementalism: appointing additional judges, improving case management and accelerating disposal rates. These measures are not irrelevant, but they misidentify the crisis as a quantitative shortage rather than a structural design failure. The judiciary is not merely under-resourced. It is institutionally saturated with disputes that, in a functionally differentiated legal order, would be resolved outside formal adjudication. The consequence is institutional congestion, where courts shift from principled adjudication to default repositories of unresolved social and commercial conflict.
This structural imbalance requires a rethinking of Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR), not as peripheral reform rhetoric but as core justice infrastructure. Mediation, arbitration, conciliation and negotiated settlement are globally embedded mechanisms grounded in efficiency, party autonomy and relational preservation. Pakistan has already recognized ADR through statutory and institutional frameworks. The central problem is therefore not legal absence but institutional non-performance. That non-performance is rooted in a persistent gap between formal incorporation and substantive internalization. In limited urban legal ecosystems, there is partial fluency in arbitration clauses and structured settlements. Beyond these enclaves, ADR often collapses into procedural symbolism. Mediation is still widely mistaken for informal bargaining rather than a structured process governed by neutrality, confidentiality, voluntariness and disciplined facilitation.
At a deeper level, Pakistan’s ADR failure is epistemic as much as institutional. The system does not suffer from a lack of rules; it suffers from a lack of capability. Arbitration and mediation are specialized juridical practices requiring rigorous training in procedural design, evidentiary discipline, dispute cognition, ethical neutrality and settlement structuring. Yet accreditation regimes and appointment practices rarely reflect this complexity. The result is a widening gap between formal authority and functional competence. Mediation without method becomes improvised persuasion; arbitration without rigour becomes adjudication rebranded.
Cost dynamics further distort ADR’s promise. Although often justified as efficient and economical, arbitration in practice can become prohibitively expensive due to escalating professional fees and procedural redundancy. This transforms ADR into a stratified mechanism of private adjudication, accessible primarily to well-resourced actors. A system designed to expand access to justice risks reproducing exclusion through price.
Institutional design deficits compound these problems. Pakistan lacks specialized judicial forums capable of developing coherent arbitration and mediation jurisprudence. The absence of doctrinal consolidation produces fragmented enforcement standards and uncertainty in outcomes. Without institutional anchoring, ADR cannot generate the predictability required for commercial confidence or civil legitimacy. Procedural incentives are equally underdeveloped. Comparative legal systems demonstrate that ADR becomes effective where refusal to engage in settlement carries meaningful consequences. In Pakistan, ADR remains structurally optional and therefore predictably underutilized. None of this displaces the constitutional centrality of courts. Courts remain indispensable as guarantors of rights, interpreters of constitutional meaning and final arbiters of contested legality. But constitutional centrality is not institutional entitlement to overload. When courts are required to absorb disputes that are structurally amenable to earlier resolution, their authority is diluted by volume. Properly understood, ADR does not rival adjudication; it preserves it by filtering disputes and reserving judicial capacity for questions that truly require authoritative determination.
The deeper crisis is therefore not procedural but systemic. Pakistan has not merely accumulated backlog; it has normalized adjudication as the default mode of dispute processing. Litigation is treated as endurance rather than as a calibrated procedural choice. This orientation is unsustainable. Not all disputes require adjudication and not all conflict resolution requires judicial victory. Settlement is not a concession of weakness. It is an optimization of legal rationality under conditions of institutional scarcity. The reform imperative is now structural rather than rhetorical. Until training becomes exacting, institutions become specialized, incentives become consequential and legal culture shifts from adjudication-first reasoning to resolution-oriented design, ADR will remain formally entrenched but functionally constrained. The real question is no longer whether ADR belongs in Pakistan’s justice system. It already does. The question is whether Pakistan’s legal order is willing to reorganize itself around that fact, rather than treating ADR as an ornamental appendix to litigation.
—The writer is a commentator on International and Comparative Law.
