Judicial budget worth 5km highway

Let us start with the figures. This year's budget is Tk9.38 lakh crore, and the law minister himself called the judiciary the most neglected sector, with an allocation smaller than the state broadcaster's. How small a share does the judiciary actually receive?

This year, the judiciary, the Law and Justice Division, and the Supreme Court together, is set to receive Tk2,419 crore, just 0.26% of a Tk9.38 lakh crore budget — a quarter of 1%. A dozen years ago it was 0.45%; the proportion has almost halved, even as the figure in taka rose. 

The Supreme Court gets Tk291 crore, while the state television channel gets Tk347 crore, nearly a fifth more. One has to ask whether the light of the screen is worth more than justice. 

For perspective, the entire judicial budget is roughly what five kilometres of an eight-lane highway costs. With it we run the courts of a country with 18 crore people against some 1,800 judges and 47 lakh pending cases.

Why is a sector this fundamental left so starved, year after year? Is it simply a matter of money, or something about how the state and Parliament see the courts?

Part of the fault is ours. From February each year, business bodies, contractors and the real-estate lobby press the Finance Ministry with their demands; the legal fraternity never does. 

I have tried to convene such discussions, and NGO workers and journalists come, but practising lawyers never turn up. Without pressure, nothing moves. 

The deeper problem is a lack of understanding. Some 60-70% of our members of parliament are businessmen, who have little interest in the law and, if they fall into legal trouble, can usually manage it. 

Few legislatures anywhere are so business-heavy. And we are among the very few countries with no law cadre in our ministries, almost no trained legal people to advise a minister or a secretary on what the law actually requires.

We are told this budget is about economic recovery and attracting investment. Does a weak judiciary actually hold the economy back, and what does that mean for the deregulation drive the budget promises?

The connection is direct. 

When a foreign investor considers Bangladesh, the first thing he asks is what happens if a dispute arises, what the mechanism is and how long it will take. 

The moment he learns that a case will not be resolved for 10 years, he turns back and invests elsewhere; he has 50 other countries to choose from. 

Domestic investors want the same assurance, that if someone wrongs them there is somewhere to seek a remedy. This is why so much of the talk about attracting investment is merely for show. The budget's deregulation pledges are the same. You cannot ease the cost of doing business while the courts that enforce every contract remain exactly as they were.

Beyond the headline allocation, what is daily life in the courts actually like? The buildings, the courtrooms, the basic resources judges have to work with?

There is a shortage of some 240 courtrooms; 482 judges share courtrooms, and their offices too. 

The stationery budget runs out within two months, so a judge who needs paper, a pen, even a bucket or a towel for the washroom, has no money for it. The bench clerk somehow arranges it, and where that money comes from raises its own questions; the scarcity itself breeds irregularity.

The Supreme Court's main building dates from the 1960s and has had no real upkeep. Not long ago the Appellate Division's roof leaked in the rain. The lift shakes, and has never, in my memory, been serviced. That is the physical state of the institution we expect to deliver justice.

Public anger after some brutal crimes has produced loud demands for harsher punishment and faster trials. As a lawyer, how do you read those demands?

Our instincts make things worse. It has been settled for 200 years that crime does not fall with the severity of punishment; the harsher the penalty, the more often judges acquit, because they will not send a man to the gallows on weak evidence. 

We now have more than 2,700 prisoners on death row awaiting the outcome of appeals; by that count we stand perhaps fourth or fifth in the world, after China, Saudi Arabia and Iran. Demanding ever faster trials is itself contrary to the rule of law. 

Prison is meant to return a better person to society, not to exact revenge, but here prisoners simply wait, because the backlog never clears.

If the situation is this bad, how hard, and how expensive, is it actually to fix?

None of this is rocket science; many countries have cleared their backlogs. 

We already have a stable legal system, district courts established in 1895, the lawyers, the judges, the whole structure in place. Building a bridge across a great river is hard; repairing one that already stands is easy, and our bridge is merely rickety from neglect. 

An extra Tk1,000 crore a year for five years could turn the system around by the early 2030s, and the return would be large. The World Justice Project's rule-of-law index, where we sit near the bottom, shows that countries with strong rule of law have stronger economies, higher incomes, less corruption and longer lives.

Finally, the question of independence. The Constitution promises it, and the July Uprising demanded it. Are we any closer, and what must happen now?

The Constitution says four times that judges shall be independent; it says no such thing of the executive or of Parliament. 

Yet how independent are they in practice? Under the original 1972 Constitution, the Supreme Court alone controlled the appointment, posting and transfer of the lower judiciary; today the Ministry of Law, Justice, and Parliamentary Affairs still does it, in consultation with the court. 

We should return to that original provision, and the judiciary must have its own secretariat, because as long as the Law Ministry can put its nose in, there is no independence. The interim government issued an ordinance for a separate secretariat, but it has lapsed; the promised law and the judge-appointment ordinance must now follow within months. 

A trillion-dollar economy by 2034 is achievable, but only with a judiciary that actually works. Otherwise it stays a slogan, pushed to 2040, and then beyond.