How years of waiting in the lower courts becomes a quiet form of corruption — one that almost always favours the side with more money and time.
There is an old maxim every law student in Pakistan learns: justice delayed is justice denied. It is not a complaint about impatience. It describes a real injustice. When a case takes ten, twenty, or thirty years, the delay itself decides the outcome — and it decides it in favour of whoever can afford to wait. A landlord can outlast a tenant. A powerful litigant can outlast an ordinary one. The poor settle for less simply to escape the system. Delay, in other words, is not a side-effect of the courts. For the powerful, it is a strategy.
This report focuses on the lower (district) judiciary — the civil and sessions courts where most ordinary disputes begin and where the great majority of cases are stuck. It is here, far below the headlines about the Supreme Court, that most Pakistanis actually experience the justice system.
The backlog is heaviest at the bottom of the system, exactly where ordinary citizens enter it. The table below shows how pending cases were distributed across the tiers of the courts on 31 December 2024, the latest period covered by the Law and Justice Commission of Pakistan's biannual judicial statistics.
| Court level | What it handles | Pending cases |
|---|---|---|
| Supreme Court | Final appeals, constitutional matters | 57,316 |
| High Courts | Appeals, writ petitions (one per province + Islamabad) | 348,983 |
| District judiciary | Civil & criminal cases — where most disputes start | 1,933,755 |
More recently the Supreme Court said its own backlog had fallen for the first time in nearly a decade — from 60,446 at the start of January 2024 to 56,169 by October 2025, in a statement the court issued that month — but the far larger weight of cases remains in the district courts.
A case does not stall for one reason. It stalls because many small problems stack on top of each other, each adding months or years. Understanding the chain is the first step to fixing it.
The single biggest driver is simply too few judges for too many cases. In busy districts a civil judge's daily cause list can run to dozens of matters at once — which makes a careful hearing impossible and an adjournment almost inevitable. Vacancies, frequent transfers of judges, and crumbling court infrastructure make it worse.
When a case can outlive the person who filed it, "winning" no longer means being right. It means being able to wait.
Delay is not neutral. It converts the court — meant to be the great equaliser — into an instrument that rewards money and power. Here is how the same backlog plays out very differently depending on who you are.
| What delay does | For the powerful litigant | For the ordinary citizen |
|---|---|---|
| A 15-year case | A manageable cost; lawyers on retainer | Savings drained; often forced to give up |
| Disputed land | Keep using it while the case drags on | Locked out of their own property for years |
| Pressure to settle | Offer a low settlement to end the wait | Accept far less than they are owed |
| Witnesses & evidence | Time lets memories fade and proof vanish | The weaker, time-sensitive case collapses |
There is also a more direct kind of corruption woven through the delay: court staff who control files and hearing dates can quietly sell speed — or sell further delay. Surveys bear this out: Transparency International Pakistan's National Corruption Perception Survey for 2025, published that December, found 14 per cent of the 4,000 people it polled naming the judiciary among Pakistan's most corrupt sectors, ranking it third behind the police and public procurement. The backlog gives that bargaining its power; if dates were automatic and transparent, there would be far less to sell.
The deepest cost is that citizens stop trusting the courts at all. In some areas people turn to informal forums — jirgas and panchayats — that promise quick resolution but can ignore basic rights and the law, sometimes with tragic results. A justice system that is too slow does not just delay justice; it pushes people outside the law altogether.
The picture is not entirely bleak. For the first time in nearly a decade, the Supreme Court's own backlog has begun to fall — announcing the drop in October 2025, the court credited a judicial reform plan, better case management, and a push toward digitised, technology-driven courts. Model courts, fixed timelines for certain case types, and e-filing pilots have shown that backlog responds to management — it is not a law of nature. The challenge is scaling those gains down to the district courts, where the real mountain sits.
The lesson of the lower courts is simple but stark: a right you cannot enforce in a reasonable time is barely a right at all. Reducing delay is not a technical footnote to fighting corruption — for most Pakistanis, it is the fight.