AHMEDABAD: After fixing Wednesdays exclusively to hear only old pending cases, the Gujarat High Court has now decided to conduct judicial work on working Saturdays as well, at least until October.In yet another measure taken to address the problem of backlog, particularly more than a decade-old cases, the HC has constituted 12 special benches—nine division benches and three single-judge benches—which will conduct judicial work on the Saturdays on which the court registry is working. The HC registry follows the central government calendar.There are as many as 5,627 such criminal appeals pending for more than a decade. There are 323 cases pending for over 25 years, as they were filed in or before 2000.In a notification issued on Thursday, the HC’s registrar (judicial) stated that the specially constituted benches will sit “for adjudicating 10-year-old criminal appeals and the appeals in which convicts have been in jail for more than 10 years for the period from July 2025 to October 2025 on the working Saturdays of the registry.”The notification further stated, “The criminal appeals will be listed before the special benches on Saturdays, irrespective of whether the said matters are already fixed or adjourned to another date. This will be done by preponing or postponing the date assigned by the courts/system-generated next listing date.”As different benches in the HC started hearing the 100 oldest matters on Wednesdays, the notification clarified, “The criminal appeals will be notified excluding the 100 oldest matters, which will continue to be listed every Wednesday under the heading ‘Wednesday Weekly List’.”From July 2, the HC has decided to hear only old pending cases on Wednesdays. There are nearly 14% of HC’s total pending cases which are pending for more than 10 years. The HC has a backlog of over 1.77 lakh cases, according to the details placed on the National Judicial Data Grid.