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• Zaki: Speedier appeals only if lawyers buck up

©Bernama (Used by permission)

PUTRAJAYA, June 23 (Bernama) -- The call by Bar Council president Datuk Ambiga Sreenevasan to appoint senior lawyers to help clear the backlog of cases is a separate issue from the Court of Appeal's request for cooperation from lawyers.

In a move to clear more than 10,000 backlog civil cases, Court of Appeal president Tan Sri Zaki Tun Azmi has reiterated his call to the council to help provide information requested by the court on pending appeals.

In a press statement Monday, he said the information was needed to enable the court to prioritise court cases which could, and needed to be speedily disposed off.

The cases include simple civil interlocutory applications.

Zaki said only lawyers handling the respective court cases could ensure that records of appeals were complete before the Court of Appeal registry could fix the hearing dates or call the cases up for case management.

He said it was obviously easier and speedier for each lawyer to give the information on his/her files than for the registry to go through every single file and call up every lawyer handling the cases to know their (cases) status.

Zaki was commenting on an article published by a local English newspaper on Sunday, reporting that Sreenivasan urged that senior lawyers be appointed as judicial commissioners to assist in the disposal of cases.

"Although the report relates to the request of the Court of Appeal for information on the pending appeals, the president of the Bar Council did not comment on the lack of cooperation from members of the Bar to provide the requested information," he said.

Perhaps, Zaki said, more effort was needed to persuade the members of the Bar to cooperate with the court to furnish the requested information.

He also responded to Sreenivasan's statement that lawyers were unable to provide information on criminal appeals pending in the Court of Appeal because those cases could be court-assigned cases.

Zaki said cases involving assigned counsels were only in respect of some criminal cases, adding that what was more important were the civil cases, adding that there were about 10,000 pending civil cases as compared to 900 criminal cases.

"There are a lot of appeals that had been filed but parties do not wish to proceed. There are also instances, where the judgments had been written by the high court judges but are not filed at the Court of Appeal.

"All these add to delay in fixing dates of hearing of appeals," added Zaki.

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