Staff Report
Wednesday, July 22, 2009

LAHORE: This year the budget allocations for the judiciary are 21 percent more than the previous year, Punjab chief minister’s Senior Adviser Zulfiqar Khosa said on Tuesday.

Khosa was addressing a joint press conference with Provincial Law Minister Rana Sanaullah at the Chief Minister’s Secretariat and said the Punjab government was spending Rs 12 billion each year to institutionalise and improve the functioning of the judiciary to ensure dispensation of speedy and inexpensive justice.

Khosa said the judiciary was given Rs 2.307 billion in 2007-08, Rs 4.3 billion in 2008-09 and this fiscal year Rs 5.237 billion had been allocated for it. He said budgetary allocation for the judiciary in the fiscal year 2008-09 was 86 percent more than in 2007-08 and this year the raise was 21.8 percent. He said 10 new posts of judges and 180 for the supplementary staff had been created at a cost of Rs 86.5 million to ease work load on the Lahore High Court (LHC), which was being provided an additional Rs 38.7 million to meet its miscellaneous expenditures. Under the long-term measures proposed by the LHC chief justice (CJ), 200 new civil judge-cum-judicial magistrate posts and 1,600 posts of their subordinate staff had been created with a total expenditure of Rs 420.6 million.

Speaking at the conference, the law minister said all measures had been taken in line with the judicial policy announced by the chief justice of Pakistan. He added that the Punjab government and the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) firmly believed that no country could progress without the provision of justice to the common man and this was precisely what the government was aiming to do by taking all possible steps.