Pakistan, May 12 -- Speaking at an event on Monday, Supreme Court Justice Miangul Hassan Aurangzeb urged judges to refer more cases to mediation without treating referral as an abdication of adjudication. He announced plans to train judges and court officials as mediators and to establish a Supreme Court-based mediation centre with financial assistance from the United Nations Development Programme.

Why it matters is obvious: by September 2025, the federal law minister was citing a backlog of 2.4 million cases in Pakistan's courts, including over 300,000 in the high courts and 1.8 million in the district courts, where civil disputes can take up to 15 years to conclude. ADR, by contrast, is said to resolve disputes in an average of 75 days...