The Lawyer community protested over the abolishment of the experience requirement for civil judges and boycotted court proceedings across Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.
The Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Bar Council has announced a complete boycott of court proceedings across the province today against the new procedure for appointing civil judges, due to which normal judicial activities have been suspended in all district and session courts of the province.
According to the KP Bar Council, the decision to boycott has been taken after the Law Department abolished the condition of two years of experience as a lawyer for the appointment of civil judges. Under the new decision, candidates without any practical legal experience will be able to be appointed as civil judges in the future, over which the legal community has expressed serious reservations.
The Bar Council maintains that the condition of two years of legal experience is indispensable to ensure the quality of the judicial system and the provision of justice. Lawyers said that the appointment of people without judicial experience will not only affect the process of justice but may also jeopardize the rights of litigants.
The KP Bar Council has claimed that the two-year experience requirement was initially decided in consultation with the council and the Peshawar High Court, but the recent unilateral change has created serious anxiety among the lawyers. According to bar leaders, this decision, made without taking the lawyers into confidence, is unacceptable.
The boycott has postponed the hearing of thousands of cases, while litigants have faced severe difficulties. Lawyers’ organizations have warned that if the demands are not accepted, the protest movement may be intensified.
On the other hand, the law department has not yet issued a detailed response on the matter; however, according to legal experts, changing the procedure for appointing civil judges is a sensitive matter on which consensus between the bar and the bench is inevitable.
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