It is time to revamp the judiciary: HC

The High Court (HC) in an observation said the time has come to purge the justice system of a malaise by reforming it from scratch.

"The judiciary is the last resort of the people. When it sells a verdict through corruption, the people have nowhere else to go. They get angry and seek an alternative, and that is when they turn to goons, terrorists and mafias seeking justice," said the HC in its verdict over an abandoned property in Dhaka.  

The time has come to revamp the justice system which is the last resort of the people, and to make it a reliable, credible and an ideal institution by rooting out corruption, said the HC bench of Justice Md Ashraful Kamal and Justice Rajik Al Jalil.

Though the verdict on the land was issued on December 11 last year, the 144-page full verdict was published on the Supreme Court website recently.

The HC in the verdict labelled the land and property on 56/57 holding in Dhaka's Kakrail area abandoned, and asked the Dhaka deputy commissioner to hand it over to the Neurodevelopment Disability Protection Trust for differently-abled people.    

The HC gave the order after hearing two separate writs which were filed challenging the ruling of Dhaka's First Court of Settlement in 1995. The state filed the writs at the HC last year.   

During the hearing, Deputy Attorney General Wayes Al Haruni represented the state while Advocate Sihab Uddin Mahmud moved for the defence. 

The HC gave an order to send a copy of the judgment to PM Sheikh Hasina and all deputy commissioners across the country.

The abandoned land is worth millions, observed the court, and said the settlement courts had handed over such high-priced properties to fraudsters and collaborators of the Pakistan army without verifying the actual documents and testimonies.  

According to the HC judgment, four individuals in 1988 and 1989 separately claimed ownership of the land totalling nearly 17 kathas. They applied at the settlement court to exclude the plots from the list of abandoned properties. 

However, the individuals could not present relevant papers such as utility bills to support their claims. In 1995, Dhaka's First Court of Settlement issued its ruling excluding the land from the abandoned property list, which went in favor of the four individuals.