Attorney-General and Minister for Justice, Dr. Dominic Akuritinga Ayine, has defended a proposed legal education reform bill aimed at restructuring professional legal training in Ghana, saying the move will eliminate long-standing barriers to entry into the legal profession.
Speaking in Parliament, Dr. Ayine stated that the bill seeks to remove what he described as a bottleneck created by the monopoly of the Ghana School of Law and its entrance examination system.
“What this bill seeks to do is to clear the bottleneck, which is the monopoly of the Ghana School of Law and the so-called entrance examination that has made it virtually impossible for even students who graduate with first-class honours from very reputable universities to gain admission,” he said.
According to the Attorney-General, the proposed legislation introduces major reforms, including an accreditation programme designed to ensure that universities offering professional legal training meet strict quality standards.
“We are introducing an accreditation programme to make sure that it is not every mushroom law faculty that will produce lawyers who will go on to write the Bar examination,” Dr. Ayine explained.
He added that the accreditation process would guarantee that students trained at approved universities receive professional education comparable to the current system.
“There will be accreditation and quality control to ensure that if a university is producing LLB candidates, those candidates would have gone through training that is either equivalent to or better than what I went through before becoming a lawyer,” he noted.
Dr. Ayine further disclosed that the bill proposes the introduction of a National Bar Examination to standardize the qualification process for prospective lawyers across the country.
“We are introducing the National Bar Examination so that those who go through the law practice training course at accredited universities can all sit for a standardized examination administered by the Council for Legal Education and its Bar Examinations Committee,” he stated.
The proposed reforms, according to the Minister, are intended to expand access to legal education while maintaining high professional standards in Ghana’s legal system.
The bill is expected to generate debate among legal practitioners, academics, and students, as it seeks to significantly transform the structure of professional legal training in the country.
