A justice of the Supreme Court of Ghana, Yonny Kulendi, has urged sponsors and drafters of the proposed legislation on legal education to provide a framework that addresses contemporary challenges in the sector.
Speaking at the induction of fresh students into the Ghana School of Law on Saturday, he said the existing legislation was put in place based on colonial thinking and therefore may not be so relevant to current times and advised that the contemplated legislation should assess the history of legal education and address the challenges identified.
There is already a private members’ bill before Parliament, with hints from the Attorney General, Godfred Dame of yet another draft bill in the works.
Justice Kulendi said, “the social data on which these pieces of legislation depended on for their enactment was drawn from the colonial thinking. The continuous relevance of such data might thus be questioned in our current context. Thus, today, we must understand our history, values and principles from this journey.”
“The supposed or contemplated bill on legal education will have to deal with the existing effects provided in the vestiges of the signs of legislation that provided the current law and more fundamentally in accordance with article 106 will have to map out reasonable remedies for redressing such effects properly identified,” he said.
Meanwhile, the Ghana Bar Association has charged the fresh students to begin to imbibe in themselves the ethics of the legal profession.
The Association said this is the surest way of ensuring that they come out as consummate professionals who would be conscious of their duty to their clients.
The Bar Association Treasurer, Nana Serwaa Acheampong in a speech on behalf of the Bar President, Yaw Acheampong-Boafo said, “as future members of our revered profession, the president of the GBA would like you to begin to uphold the ethics of the legal profession by emulating some cardinal standards the legal profession namely professionalism, integrity, discipline, knowledge of the law, courtesy and etiquette”.
