Court bailiffs race against technology to deliver notices
KARACHI: Abdul Sattar Hakim hurriedly sorts out the stacks of the court summons, stuffs them in his bag and rushes out of the Sindh High Court building on a motorcycle. The 60-year-old court bailiff’s race is not against time, but against technology – he has to serve the notices to the litigants before an e-mail or instant text message reaches them.
“I’ve taken only one leave in the last 25 years and that was when my son passed away,” he told The Express Tribune, adding proudly, “No one can break my record of being the most punctual bailiff, even after my retirement due in January 2014 as the head of the Bailiff Branch of the high court.”
With only a month left to his retirement, Hakim, who has already completed 43 years of service, wants to prove that he is still more effective, efficient and reliable than the mobile texting and e-mail service recently introduced by the high court to “intimate the litigants timely and surely” a day before their cases are fixed in courts for hearing.
“In the early days, I travelled in public buses to serve court notices to the litigants,” he said, pointing to the two annexe added to the high court’s main building during his years in service. “Later, I bought a bicycle and today, I have a motorcycle,” he said, adding that the high court has provided 70cc motorcycles to the bailiffs to carry out daily field operations.
Bailiff versus SMS
Bailiffs are generally known to be the court officials who are often approached by the legal parties for ‘favours’, which include helping lawyers to obtain one-sided decrees by deliberately delaying the delivery of summons. Former SHC Chief Justice Mushir Alam was aware of how the troika [of lawyers, bailiffs and litigants) works and to end such tactics, the SMS and e-mail alert service was launched in June 2012 for the first time in the country.
Next door to the Bailiff Branch, sit the data processing officers who are busy generating SMS and e-mails in the air-conditioned information technology department.
“On average, we issue 2,000 to 2,500 SMS alerts daily which are sent to lawyers, plaintiffs and defendants a day before their cases are fixed in the courts,” said a data processing officer, Waseem Hassan. The message includes names of the relevant judge, number of the case in the daily list and other information. “The number of e-mails sent out is less as most of the recipients are not computer literate.”
Although these messages do not hold any legal binding for the litigants to appear in court, it is mandatory for every lawyer to be registered with the IT department to avail this free-of-cost SMS and email alert service.
Question of replacement
The bailiffs are, however, not too worried about being replaced by this service as they question its reliability. “With government frequently shutting down mobile services, what is the guarantee that the parties will be alerted on time? And can this service perform all the other duties that bailiffs are tasked with?” asked one of the bailiffs. “I don’t think the service is going to work as efficiently as we do.”
Admitting that it needs to be made more reliable, IT officials said that the service could be further upgraded once it is decided that the SMS and e-mail intimation alerts would be considered as court summons.
“The lawyers do not seem happy with this service as more and more litigants now personally come to the courts after being intimated by us,” another data-processing officer told The Express Tribune. “One data-processing officer remains in the office all the time to monitor the service, which automatically generates the messages and sends them round-the-clock, even on Sundays and official holidays.”
Happy with their job, unhappy with lack of appreciation
Twenty-one bailiffs are supposed to serve 2,000 to 2,500 notices on an average across the sprawling port city every day.
The Bailiff Branch echoes with the shouts of the bailiffs asking each other about addresses of the plaintiff or respondents, besides other information. Piles of summons are carefully arranged on the tables in the large hall that might run short of space as the number of cases continues to increase.
Apart from delivering summons, the bailiffs are also required to perform a host of other duties, such as verifying death, supervising exhuming of graves, sealing properties and freeing the unlawfully detained citizens at police stations.
Hakim, the head of the Bailiff Branch who has performed hundreds of thousands of such tasks over the years in service, received publicity when he had a brawl with a former prime minister’s protocol officer for sealing his illegally built commercial plaza in the city. Yet, he regrets, there are no words of appreciation. “My only achievement is being officially given the designation of the Head Bailiff, but with no perks,” adding that he had joined the service in grade five and would retire in the same.
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