Close to a thousand law students in the country and sympathizers are currently embarking on a demonstration exercise to demand reforms in the country’s legal education system.
The protest dubbed #OpenUpLegalEducation, is expected to end with the protesters marching to the Jubilee House to present a petition to the President.
Their demonstration is on the back of the recent failure recorded at the Ghana School of law where only 128 students out of the 1,820 candidates who sat for this year’s entrance exams passed.
Some of the demonstrators who spoke to Citi News said the protest is as a result the difficulty in getting into the Ghana School of Law despite having an LLB certificate.
Speaking to Citi News, spokesperson for the group, Nii Senpe Adokwei Cudjoe said, the demonstration is to press home their demands to the relevant institutions.
“We are on a demonstration to press home our demands, which over the years, have fallen on deaf ears. Our call for total reforms is based on the fact that we believe law students who have an LLB certificate should be allowed to have access to the professional law course. We are very concerned about the failure rate. We believe the failure is not genuine. At the School of Law too, we are concerned about the growing failure rate,” he said.
The demonstrators, clad in red were repeatedly chanting the phrase: “And help us to resist the oppressor’s rule.”
Most of the students at the demonstration are of the view that the recent mass failure at the entrance exam was the latest attempt to limit the number of professional lawyers in the country.
Some of the inscriptions on the placards held at the demonstrations read; “Law school is not for a particular family”, “CJ you are not God”, “CJ office, GLC is transient” “Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely”, “Open Legal Education now, we cannot wait any longer”.
