We’ll expand legal education - Mahama

The opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) has said when given the opportunity to run the affairs of the country again, in the December 2020 polls, it will grant accreditation to certified law faculties in the country to run the professional law course.

This, according to the NDC, will ensure access to professional legal education for all across the country.

The NDC disclosed this during the launch of its 2020 manifesto in Accra on Monday, 7 September 2020.

The NDC noted it will “vigorously reform and expand access to professional legal education and provide opportunities to all qualified LLB holders by granting accreditation to certified law faculties to undertake the professional law qualification course.”

Also, the main opposition party and its flag bearer, John Dramani Mahama promised to“review the Legal Profession Act in consultation with stakeholders, and establish a council for legal education and training, to accredit certified law faculties to run the Professional Law Course subject to the oversight supervision of the council.

It further added that it will “establish a faculty of law in the Northern Region to serve the northern sector.”

Currently, there is no faculty of law in the Northern Region.

Access to the professional law course has also been a concern to most LLB graduates across the country with 1000s of students failing to qualify to the Ghana School of Law (GSL).

Out of the 1,820 candidates who sat for the Ghana School of Law Entrance Exams 2019, only 128 of them passed, according to the results posted on the notice board of the school.

The examination was in two parts: two written questions and objectives.

There was a similar magnitude of failure in 2018.

Former Chief Justice Sophia Akuffo earlier in 2019 stated that the mass production of lawyers will not happen under her watch.

She stated: “Those of you lawyers and those of you lecturers who are busy advocating free scale, mass admissions into the professional law course, and mass production of lawyers, be careful what you wish for.”

“So long as I have anything to do with it, it won’t happen. Just like you can’t mass-produce doctors and surgeons, Ghanaians must not have mass-produced lawyers imposed on them,” the Chief Justice said when she addressed the Bench, Bar and Faculty Conference at the Labadi Beach Hotel on the theme: ‘The Changing Landscape in the Law – the Judge, the Lawyer and the Academic’.

She added: “Those of us who have been too long on the General Legal Council, those of us who spent too long on the Disciplinary Committee, we have cause to worry because the kinds of misconduct are such that there is no way anybody envisaged these categories of misconduct when the Legal Profession Act was being enacted in the 1960s.”