Minority Leader, Haruna Iddrisu, has advocated the appointment of a five-member eminent committee to review and reform legal education in the country.
“There should be a national conversation on the future of legal education to allow develop a roadmap that will help us to know what legal education should look like in the next 20 years,” he said this when he contributed on the floor of Parliament on the report of the Committee on Constitutional,Legal and Parliamentary Affairs on the written petition by the National Association of Law Students seeking reforms in the country’s legal system.
Ghana’s legal education has been fraught with challenges over mass failures of law students, the proliferation of private legal institutions, infrastructural capacity of the Ghana School of Law among others.
His contributions followed Parliament’s adoption of the Committee’s report which among others recommended to the Attorney-General and Minister of Justice to submit a new Bill to the House to replace the Legal Profession (Amendment) Bill 2018 to tackle the challenges confronting legal education.
It stated that upon preliminary review of the Bill, it was of the view that the Bill had been overtaken by events and thus should be withdrawn and replaced with a new one to enhance legal education.
“The committee considers that the current challenges confronting the country’s legal education system offer unique opportunity for us to carry out massive legislative and structural reforms towards finding lasting solution to the challenges in the system,” it said.
Report
The Chairman of the Constitutional, Legal and Parliamentary Affairs, Mr Ben Abdallah Banda, who made the call, also urged the General Legal Council (GCL) to expedite action in the remarking of the scripts of students who failed in the 2019 entrance examination upon request and payment of reasonable fees.
He stated this when presented a report of the committee on the petition by the National Association of Law Students seeking reforms in the country’s legal system to Parliament today.
Background
The Independent Examination Committee (IEC), a body tasked with the responsibility of conducting both entrance and professional law examinations on behalf of the GLC, conducted 2019 entrance examination for admission to the Ghana School of Law (GSL) on July 26, 2019.
The result showed that only 128 (representing seven per cent) out of the 1,820 candidates who wrote the examination passed, while 1,692 failed.
Following the release of the results, the National Association of Law Students staged a demonstration in Accra to protest against the mass failures and thereafter submitted a petition to the President and copied the Speaker and other distinguished personalities.
The association alleged that the GLC instituted the entrance examination in the admission process as a filtration mechanism to deal with the failure on their part to provide corresponding facilities to absorb the increasing numbers.
They maintained that the mass failures recorded did not reflect actual performance of the students but they rather showed the systemic failure within Ghana’s legal education system.
Following the adoption of the report, some parliamentarians expressed divergent opinions on the best way to institute reforms in the country’s legal education.
Expand infrastructure
The MP for Tamale Central, Mr Inusah Fuseini, described what the challenge confronting the Ghana School of Law as a crisis which he blamed on consistent lack of planning and inability of the authorities to expand infrastructure to allow more admission of students.
He noted that the infrastructures at the law school were built in the 1960s when the initial admission were seven students.
“At the time the GSL was built, there was only one university in Ghana inviting students for the law school but today institutions of higher learning are more than 10 and growing, and all of them contribute students to the GSL,” he stated.
No deliberate failures
The First Deputy Speaker of Parliament, Mr Joseph Osei-Owusu, disagreed that there was a deliberate attempt by GSL to deny students access to the law school as no concrete evidence had been made available by the students to justify such assertion.
“In the meeting of the committee with the GLC and the law students, the law schools said they were expecting 1,200 students and they had made effort to obtain extra classrooms, advertised and interviewed extra lecturers. So after going through all these processes, why would they deliberately fail many students,” he asked.
Liberalisation of legal faculties
The MP for Bawku Central, Mr Mahama Ayariga, said while there had been liberalisation of law faculties in private institutions to run degree programmes, the General Legal Council had not been involved in the supervision of such programmes.
“Because the Council is not involved in what is happening at the faculty level, they are not capable of informing the system and practices that will result in quality products being presented to them.
“So we need to reconsider this legal arrangement where the Legal Council has no control over what is happening in the faculties of private and public legal schools,” he said, and called for reconsideration amendment of the laws that established the National Accreditation Board and the National Council for Tertiary Education to allow the Legal Counsel exercise control at level of accreditation of private institutions that wanted to ran law degrees.
Source: Eugene Davis || thebusiness24online.com