76 new judges to clear backlog of cases  at Hulftsdorp

By Saman Indrajith

Justice Minister Ali Sabry yesterday told Parliament that 50 new courtrooms would be established in the vicinity of Hulftsdorp and 76 new judges would be appointed in order to clear the backlog of cases.

The country’s people to a judge ratio a was 1,000,000 to 15 judges, the Minister said, adding that the number of judges should be doubled in the coming months.

The Minister said that the number of cases had increased during the past few decades but the number of judges did not increase correspondingly. There was a limit to the workload a single judge could handle and there would be an inevitable collapse of the process of dispensing justice when the number of cases exceeded the limits humanly possible for a judge to handle.

There were only 340 judges in the entire country to hear all the existing cases, the Minister said.

He said the process of digitisation of courts’ functions had been started and by the end of this year four courts would be fully digitalised.

New technology had been introduced to replace many court procedures following the pandemic, the Minister said.

Responding to a question raised by SJB Colombo District MP SM Marikkar, the Minister said that action had been initiated to fill 1,509 jailor vacancies in the coming months.  The Minister said that a competitive examination was held in June 2019 as per the government notice dated March 29, 2019 to recruit jailors but the process had been affected by the delays caused by the pandemic.