Shal­iza Has­sanali

The ju­di­cial sys­tem is so heav­i­ly over­bur­dened with cas­es it would take ten years for the coun­try's long list of mur­der cas­es to be tried be­fore the courts. Jus­tice Min­is­ter Her­bert Vol­ney broke the news dur­ing Fri­day's amend­ments to the Ad­min­is­tra­tion of Jus­tice (In­dictable Pro­ceed­ings) Bill in Par­lia­ment. Vol­ney not­ed that quite reg­u­lar­ly, much of the ju­di­cial time of a judge is spent in hear­ing pleas at the bar. In par­tic­u­lar, he said: "Where it is lawyers on be­half of their clients make an ap­pli­ca­tion for mat­ters to be per­ma­nent­ly stayed, which op­er­ates as a vir­tu­al dis­charge of a mat­ter not to be pro­ceed­ed with be­cause of de­lays and the in­her­ent prej­u­dice to ei­ther side, es­pe­cial­ly the side of the ac­cused per­son."

Not­ing that con­sid­er­able time is spent on these ap­pli­ca­tions, Vol­ney said: "We have hun­dreds of mur­der cas­es lined up to be tried. If the High Court, as now con­sti­tut­ed, in num­ber and oth­er­wise, were to spend every sin­gle day from 9 am to 4 pm sit­ting on mur­der tri­als we would not clear the list of the mur­der cas­es in the sys­tem for ten years." He de­scribed the sit­u­a­tion as bad. Vol­ney said se­ri­ous blood crimes, among them rape, mur­der, wound­ing, shoot­ing, trea­son and kid­nap­ping which af­fect the lives of hu­man be­ings, no mat­ter how old the cas­es are, would have to be tried.

"So you add that on to the ten years of mat­ters wait­ing to be tried." Vol­ney said if some­one evades the process of the court, the war­rant will be wait­ing for them and they will go to tri­al. "You can­not evade the process of the court." So over­bur­dened with cas­es in the ju­di­cial sys­tem, Vol­ney said: "So we have to cut off cer­tain cas­es...oth­er cas­es that we can­not con­tin­ue to car­ry... "And that is ex­act­ly why it is a par­a­digm shift that we take that po­si­tion." Vol­ney said this was one way of hold­ing the bull by its horns and deal­ing with the prob­lem.