US-based Ghanaian legal practitioner, Professor Kwaku Asare, popularly known as Prof. Azar has reiterated his call for the General Legal Council to be scrapped and replaced with an independent regulatory agency to regulate law education in Ghana.
He said the General Legal Council has departed from its duty of providing persons with law degrees the opportunity to pursue professional education to rather restricting them.
“Their core duty is to provide an opportunity for people with LLB to pursue their professional education but that is not what is happening here. They are not providing an opportunity; they are actually denying people the opportunity to pursue legal education, so as a matter of law, what they are doing is problematic,” he remarked.
Speaking on Eyewitness News on Wednesday, Prof. Azar insisted that major reforms are needed in the country’s legal education regime to stop the annual mass failures recorded in the School of Law Entrance Examinations.
Every year, more than 1000 students, most of whom are graduates from law faculties of various universities write entrance exams for an opportunity to study at the Ghana School of Law before becoming lawyers.
But the results of the entrance exam show mass failures with only 7% passing the 2019 exams.
Prof. Azar who has for a long time been pushing for major changes believes that there must not be any deliberate action to limit the training of lawyers in the country especially when there is rising demand for legal services in the country.
He argued that the recent intake of only 128 candidates does not make economic sense as all the three campuses of the Ghana School of Law will have to share that number and spend resources to train then when many more can be trained given the same resources.
Prof. Azar suggested that the Chief Justice, Sophia Akuffo’s recent comment about doing all she can to ensure that there isn’t mass production of lawyers in the country may cause links to be drawn to the recent development with the entrance examination.
“The Chief Justice pre-announced that she is against mass production of lawyers and what we see is an agenda to pursue that. What she has done is to create a regime that will produce mass failure of students in order to perpetrate that agenda of stopping mass production of lawyers,” he said.
“Because the Chief Justice made that earlier pronouncement, then people can link what is happening now, which is statistically absurd that she is just perpetrating that agenda,” he added.
He said the General Legal Council (GLC) must be stripped of the power to conduct entrance exams and the three Schools of Law it operates to be made to function as law faculties that will competitively be training LLB students.
“We need to decouple the education and the regulation. Let them [General Legal Council] stay on a competition basis, train them [LLB students], and when the students have their degree, they apply to take a common bar exam administered by a qualified bar examiners and anyone who passes that becomes a lawyer,” Prof. Azar suggested.
Mass entrance exam must be probed – Effah Darteh
Meanwhile, a retired Military captain and lawyer, Nkrabea Effah-Darteh has called for an enquiry into circumstances that led to the mass failure in the entrance exam.
He believes that at a time when the country needs more lawyers, efforts must be made to ascertain what led to the development and steps put in place to address it.
“This calls for an inquiry to see how come that out of 1820 only 128 could pass through. I belong to the school of thought that believes that right now Ghana, we need more lawyers more than three times what we have now…For a population that is over 30 million, we need more lawyers… I’m not saying that because we need more lawyers, if you do not pass, you should be allowed through.”