The Minority in Parliament have hinted of opposing the new Legal Profession Bill which is yet to be laid before the House.
They noted that, the proposals contained the Attorney General and Minister for Justice Bill, which they cannot support.
“The bifurcated approach that is being adopted by the Attorney General and Minister for Justice’s bill is not something we want to support and we will be galvanising support in parliament to go against that,” the Minority stressed.
Dr Dominic Ayine, the Member of Parliament (MP) for Bolgatanga East in the Upper East Region, maintained that the Minority would vehemently oppose the Attorney General and Minister for Justice’s new 2021 bill, which was yet to be laid before Parliament.
According to him, together with two other MPs, had tabled a Private Members Bill on the legal education reforms contended that combination of the regulation of professional legal education with the legal profession was untenable because the two needed to be separated.
“I do not think we should combine the regulation of professional legal education with the legal profession as a whole because in England, they have done the separation and if they are not separated, we cannot support such a bill when there’s a growing demand on legal education and we think we need a special body,” Dr Ayine postulated.
The Attorney General and Minister for Justice is seeking to introduce a Legal Profession Bill to consolidate and amend the existing legislation regulating the profession, and Clause 30(2) of the bill indicated that the General Legal Council may allocate quotas to universities that the Council has approved to run the Bachelor of Laws programme.
This has been criticised as further closing the door to legal education in the country and the already discarded interview processes as part of the admission into the Ghana Law School will be reintroduced in the Bill.
Under the new bill, the Independent Examination Committee will now become a creation of law and to appeal decisions of the General Legal Council’s Disciplinary Committee and affected persons can no longer go to the High Court but the Supreme Court. –ghanaweb.com
