A Backlog That Justifies Looking Abroad
Pakistan's Supreme Court and several high courts are sending an information-technology delegation to Beijing and Shanghai in July 2026 to study China's "Smart Court" infrastructure, including the AI-assisted "206 System" used for criminal case processing. The visit sits under a framework for judicial exchange, technology cooperation and capacity-building signed between the Supreme Court of Pakistan and China's Supreme People's Court in 2025 (INP/WealthPK).
The scale of the problem the delegation is chasing is real. Pakistan's Law and Justice Commission puts the pending caseload across superior courts and the district judiciary at 2.22 million as of December 31, 2025 (INP/WealthPK). That is not an abstraction — it is the reason Article 37(d) of Pakistan's Constitution, which promises "inexpensive and expeditious justice," and Article 10A's fair-trial guarantee are treated by Pakistan's own Supreme Court as directly implicated by court delay (Courting The Law). A litigant waiting seven years for a tenancy dispute to resolve — the actual fact pattern behind the Supreme Court's own landmark AI ruling — is not being denied justice by algorithms; they are being denied it by delay. Any tool that shortens that wait deserves serious consideration.
What China's 206 System Actually Does
The 206 System, built by Shanghai's judiciary with iFlytek, is best understood as two products bundled into one. The first is administrative: automated speech-to-text transcription of hearings, automatic surfacing of case files, warrants and evidence during trial, and case-flow management. iFlytek's speech recognition alone now runs in more than 4,200 Chinese courtrooms, and Shanghai reports trial durations cut by close to 30% (INP/WealthPK). That is the part worth copying. It touches logistics, not outcomes.
The second product is adjudicative: the system flags similar prior cases, checks evidentiary sufficiency, and recommends sentencing ranges. This is where the steelman for caution gets serious rather than reflexive. Critics of the 206 System — writing about the same tool Pakistan's delegation is going to observe — point to a documented anchoring effect: once the system flags a defendant as likely guilty, human participants tend to defer to that judgment. They also note the system's case database has had controversial rulings scrubbed after public criticism, meaning the model that recommends "similar cases" and sentences is trained on a curated, not comprehensive, record (AI Counsel). Layer onto that the fact that China's judiciary operates under Communist Party political-legal oversight, without the adversarial independence Pakistan's courts constitutionally claim, and the case for importing the adjudicative half of the system — rather than just the administrative half — gets considerably weaker.
Pakistan's Own Court Has Already Drawn This Line
Usefully, Pakistan doesn't need to invent guardrails from scratch — its Supreme Court already has. In Ishfaq Ahmed v. Mushtaq Ahmed (PLD 2025 SC 582), decided April 11, 2025, Justice Syed Mansoor Ali Shah used a routine tenancy appeal to lay out constitutional boundaries for judicial AI, grounding them explicitly in Articles 10A and 37(d). The ruling welcomes AI as an efficiency tool but warns against "hallucinations, bias, opacity, and erosion of public trust," and directs the National Judicial (Policymaking) Committee and the Law and Justice Commission of Pakistan to draft binding guidelines before wider deployment (Sociology & Cultural Research Review; Dawn). Digital Rights Foundation's coverage of the same ruling records the Court's core safeguard in the justices' own words: AI must not compromise "judicial independence, constitutional principles, or public trust" (Digital Rights Foundation).
The trouble is that those NJPMC guidelines don't yet exist in enforceable form, and Pakistan's principal digital-law statute, PECA 2016, has no provisions addressing algorithmic decision systems in adjudication at all — a genuine legal vacuum the delegation is stepping into.
The Proportionate Path
The steelman case for going to China is sound as far as it goes: a 30% cut in trial duration, replicated even partially across 1.86 million district-level cases, would be the single biggest access-to-justice gain Pakistan's judiciary could deliver this decade, and it costs nothing in judicial independence if confined to transcription, filing and docket management. Pakistan should absolutely import that layer, fast.
What it should not import on the same trip is the similar-case-recommendation and sentencing-suggestion layer, however tempting the backlog makes it. Not because AI-assisted sentencing is inherently illegitimate, but because Pakistan's own Supreme Court has already ruled that any such tool requires disclosure in judgments, verification against authorized sources, and NJPMC-issued guidelines that don't currently exist — and because the specific system on offer was built inside a judiciary with no adversarial independence to protect against the anchoring bias its own critics have documented. Study the courtroom logistics. Leave the verdict-shaping features on the shelf until Pakistan's own guidelines catch up to its own constitution.