Parliament’s legal committee to meet law students this week over ‘mass failure’

The constitutional, Legal and Parliamentary Affairs Committee of Parliament is set to meet the National Association of Law students this week over the brouhaha surrounding the mass failure that rocked the Ghana School of Law this year.

This follows an earlier meeting the Committee had with the General Legal Council and the Independent Examination Committee where the two bodies offered explanations for the occurrence.

This year, out of the about 1,800 students who sat for the entrance exams, only 128 of them passed.

Months ago, the Ghana School of Law recorded yet another case of mass examination failure with more than half of the candidates failing the bar exams.

Results released by the Independent Examinations Committee of the General Legal Council, showed that only 64 students out of the about 800 students passed in all papers.

Also, more than 80% of students who wrote the examination in May 2017 failed, as only 91 out of the over 500 candidates passed.

In 2018, students of the school took a series of actions in protest of the Bar examination results which were also poor.

Meanwhile, the Chief Justice, Sophia Akuffo has maintained her stance of not compromising on the quality of lawyers churned out from the law school.

Speaking on the topic ‘Questing for Excellence’ at the 2019 University of Ghana Alumni Lectures, Justice Akuffo told the gathering “a good lawyer for each Ghanaian is what we deserve. Not lots of lawyers.

For emphasis, she added, “I will stand here again and say we need quality lawyers, not mass-produced lawyers.”

Some have also called for the dissolution of the legal council.

A US-based Ghanaian lawyer, Prof. Kwaku Asare told Starr News in an earlier interview that Parliament should intervene to dissolve the General Legal Council.

“We are likely to see an implosion, you can only suppress people for too long and after a while they just blow up and when people blow up nobody can control the reaction that comes from that blowing up. One day we’ll sit here and the same thing that happened at KNUST will happen with this School of Law and legal education. They are frustrating too many people and they really need to sit up. The President should stop all these overseas speeches talking about things that don’t matter and come to Ghana to address this problem, ” he noted.