Parliament has adopted a recommendation for massive legislative and structural reforms towards finding lasting solutions to the challenges in the legal education system.
The House also endorsed a recommendation for the Attorney-General and Minister of Justice to submit a new Bill to the House to replace the Legal Profession (Amendment) Bill 2018 to bring to finality the current standoff between the Ghana School of Law (GSL) and law students.
The recommendations form part of the report of the Committee on Constitutional, Legal and Parliamentary Affairs on a petition that the National Association of Law Students wrote to Parliament seeking reforms in legal education.
The Committee submitted its report to plenary Wednesday in which it made the above recommendations and others.
It called on the General Legal Council (GCL) to commence processes for re-marking of scripts of the 2019 entrance examination due to the controversies surrounding the results upon request and payment of reasonable fees.
The Association of law students petitioned Parliament in which it complained that prior to 2012, LLB graduates transitioned seamlessly into professional legal training at the GSL without written examination.
According to the petition, whereas the number of law faculties and LLB graduates kept increasing the GCL kept the GSL as the sole institution administering legal training in the country, which created massive backlog of LLB holders seeking admission.
The Association noted that the GLC instituted the entrance examination in the admission process as a filtration mechanism to deal with its failure to provide adequate facilities to absorb the increasing number of LLB holders.
This, the students say, offer very little time to prepare adequately for the large number of subjects involved.
The Association called for massive reform including the scrapping of the entrance examination and to allow existing law faculties to also offer professional legal training programs.
Chairman of the Committee, Ben Abdallah Banda who presented the report to the House, noted that following deliberations and the observation members have made, there is a need for a comprehensive review of Ghana’s legal education system.
The Committee also recommended the re-marking of scripts and release of marking schemes and examiners reports by the GSL.
Ranking Member of the Committee and MP for Tamale Central, Inusa A.B. Fuseini, in his contribution while seconding the report observed there is a need for expansion of the current facilities or a change in the current model.
This, he said, has become necessary because the facility, which was built, to cater for just about six million people now has to make provision for 30 million.
He stressed the need for evaluation of the facilities, faculties, syllabus and programmes at the law school.
1st Deputy Speaker, Joseph Osei-Owusu, in his contribution admitted there is a crisis at the law school and stressed this challenge is at both the entrance and faculty levels.
According to him, on the side of supply, there is massive problem as many of the LLB students are churned out by institutions without the required mandate to run law programmes.
He, however, admitted the percentage of failures at the entrance examination is too high but stressed this could be a result of the poor education they receive at ill-prepared law faculties at some universities.
Member for Bawku Central, Mahama Ayariga, on the other hand urged the House to amend the law to give control to the GLC on running of law faculties at the universities.
This, he said, will enable the Council to weed out inappropriate faculties running law prorammes and ensure the standards are maintained at the required levels.
