Parliament has passed the Legal Education Reform Bill, 2025, to expand access to professional legal education in the country.
The bill seeks to establish the Council for Legal Education and Training to regulate professional legal education in Ghana and provide the curriculum and standards for legal education.
It will also break the monopoly the Ghana School of Law (GSL) has over professional legal education and its entrance examination, which, over the years, has barred many from pursuing further legal training to be called to the Bar.
As a remedy, the bill, if assented to by the President, will extend accreditation to other universities, including private ones, to offer professional legal programmes.
National Bar Examination
The bill introduces a Law Practice Training Course to be offered by accredited universities, which will prepare candidates for the National Bar Examination.
The Law Practice Training Course will emphasise clinical legal education and the acquisition of practical lawyering skills, rather than purely theoretical instruction.
Holders of the Bachelor of Laws (LLB) or other approved first degrees in Law will be required to gain admission to that course before qualifying to sit the National Bar Examination.
The Attorney-General and Minister of Justice, Dr Dominic Ayine, presented the bill, which enjoyed bipartisan support, to the House on October 24, last year.
Equal opportunity
Moving the motion for the bill to be read the second time on February 10, this year, Dr Ayine said the bill was in accordance with the letter and spirit of the Constitution in Article 25 to create equality of opportunity for Ghanaian citizens desirous of becoming lawyers.
He said the bill sought to clear the bottleneck associated with the monopoly of the GSL and the so-called entrance examination that made it virtually impossible for even students who graduated with First Class from very reputable universities to get into the GSL.
As part of innovations contained in the bill, Dr Ayine said the government was introducing an accreditation programme to ensure that not every mushroom LLB school produced lawyers who would go on to write the Bar examination.
“There will be accreditation and quality control to ensure that if there is a university producing LLB candidates, those candidates would have gone through a training that was either equivalent to or better than what I went through or what the Majority Leader went through before becoming lawyers.
“We are also introducing the National Bar Exam so that those who go through the law practice training course at the accredited universities can all write the National Bar Exam, which will be a standardised exam that will be administered by the Council for Legal Education and its Bar Examination Committee,” he explained.
Dawn of a new era
After the bill had been passed, the Majority Leader, Mahama Ayariga, told the House that the bill was a major campaign promise the National Democratic Congress (NDC) had made and kept.
He said, quite typical of the NDC, the party would carry out reforms that enabled equity, fairness and access to legal education.
With the Bill successfully passed, Mr Ayariga said the NDC believed it marked the dawn of a new era, where all students would be treated fairly.
“Whichever law school you go to and whichever law faculty you attend, all of us will end up at the doors of the National Bar Examination.
Whether you went to Legon, UDS, UCC or Winneba, we will all end up at the same place, and it is there that lawyers will be determined.
“We want all to witness that we have kept the promise,” he said, and commended the Attorney-General and Minister of Justice for bringing the bill expeditiously to the House, and colleague MPs for showing bipartisan support for the bill.
Double standards
The Minority Leader, Alexander Afenyo-Markin, conceded that the bill was a campaign promise of the NDC and had become a success story of the government.
He, however, outlined a number of promises the NDC had made but had failed to deliver so far.
He mentioned, for instance, promises to set up a Women’s Bank, introduce a 24-Hour Economy to create one job, three shifts, and do away with sole sourcing and nepotism.
“Mr Speaker, the President spoke about sole sourcing at the manifesto launch and talked about no sole sourcing at his first and second State of the Nation Addresses.
“But today, we know that they are the apostles of sole sourcing, and we know today that at the Presidency, the Deputy Chief of Staff has been awarded an GH¢11 million sole sourcing contract,” he said.
“The very thing that they said they would not do is what they are doing”, he added.
Source:
www.graphic.com.gh
