Alternative dispute resolution in Pakistan

Siddique Ali Pirzada BY June 2025, Pakistan’s courts confronted a backlog of approximately 2.27 million cases, while operating with nearly 1,200 fewer judges than the sanctioned strength. Of these, 361,677 were pending before the superior courts and 1,908,907 before the district judiciary. The Ministry of Law and Justice itself has acknowledged that civil litigation may extend up to 15 years. This is not administrative delay. It is structural incapacity. The system is operating with a throughput fundamentally misaligned with demand, rendering increasingly untenable the assumption that civil disputes must routinely pass through full adversarial adjudication. Reform discourse in Pakistan remains anchored in incrementalism: appointing additional judges, improving case management and accelerating disposal rates. These measures are not irrelevant, but they misidentify the crisis as a quantitative shortage rather than a structural design failure. The judiciary is not merely under-resourced. It is institutionally saturated with disputes that, in a functionally differentiated legal order, would be resolved outside formal adjudication. The consequence is institutional congestion, where courts shift from principled adjudication to default repositories of unresolved social and commercial conflict. This structural imbalance requires a rethinking of Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR), not as peripheral reform rhetoric but as core justice infrastructure. Mediation, arbitration, conciliation and negotiated settlement are globally embedded mechanisms grounded in efficiency, party autonomy and relational preservation. Pakistan has already recognized ADR through statutory and institutional frameworks. The central problem is therefore not legal absence but institutional non-performance. That non-performance is rooted in a persistent gap between formal incorporation and substantive internalization. In limited urban legal ecosystems, there is partial fluency in arbitration clauses and