Law students demonstrate against refusal of admissions to law school

The National Association of Law Students (NALS) has demonstrated against the “unjustifiable denial of admission of 499 law students at the Ghana School of Law and persistent challenges with legal education in Ghana”.

The group accused the General Legal Council of poorly handling  legal education in the country, following the increasing fail rates of students who sit for the entrance exam every year.

Members of the association clad themselves in black and red outfits and brandished branded placards with words such as “Justice for all 499 law students”, “The youths are losing hope in Ghana. Reform legal education”, “the sons and daughters of the market women must also get legal education” etc.

Sections of the protesting law students wielding their branded placards

Prior to the demonstration, the association had released the hashtags, #AdmitThe499 and #OpenUpLegalEducationNow on social media to increase awareness of their plight.

Of the 2,824 students that sat for the entrance exam this year, the Ghana School of Law announced that only 790 had obtained 50% or more and had therefore gained admission to the school.

This announcement was however met with public outrage following which a Right to Information request filed by Prof. Stephen Kwaku Asare for the school to release the raw scores of the exams showed that an additional 499 students obtained the 50% pass mark and more but had been denied admission by the school.

The Director of Legal Education at the school, Mr. Kwasi Prempeh-Eck had explained then that the 499 students were illegible for admission because they had not obtained the minimum threshold mark of 50% each in the two sections, Part A and Part B.

Nonetheless, the NALS has questioned this directive, noting that “it is curious how an originally-announced 50% pass mark morphed into 50% each in the two sections when the people of Ghana demanded transparency into the process.”

Police presence at the demonstration

The association has also noted that students “were made to sign an undertaking to note challenge the results of the exam,” a move which had been declared “arbitrary and unlawful” by the High Court in 2020 when students sued the GLC after the 2019 results were released.

The NALS has also decried the repeat policy at the Ghana School of Law which requires students who fail 3 or more of their papers to repeat the entire course.

Petition to President, Speaker and Attorney-General

In separate petitions available to Dennislaw News, the National Association of Law Students is requesting the immediate admission of the additional 499 candidates who passed the exam.

The Association noted that the passage of LI 2235 which brought back the law school entrance exam also granted power to the General Legal Council to allocate quotas for LLB faculties to run the Professional law course.

“Accordingly, the entrance exam was a stop gap or interim measure for the 2018 admission, instead of immediately allowing law faculties to provide the tuition for the professional law course. It was expected that through this quota allocation, the school’s entrance exam would be a thing of the past as all approved universities, with allocated LLB quotas, based on the determined number of LLBs for automatic admission to the Professional law course after the LLB, will resolve the year-on-year backlog of law students seeking to undertake the professional law course,” the Association argued.

However, the association has observed that the quota system that was agreed on has not been implemented by the GLC.

“Sadly, the GLC is religiously implementing the entrance exam till date, with the number of applicants escalating every year.”

Demands

1. In the short-term, we demand that the Chief Justice who chairs the GLC, the GLC itself and the Board of Legal Education, do right by these 499 candidates who passed the 2021 entrance exam and admit them IMMEDIATELY into the professional law course at the school;
2. We demand that the Attorney-General, Mr. Godfred Dame, the President’s representative on the GLC who is clothed with powers under Section 1(5) of the Legal Profession Act, 1960 (Act 32), to order the GLC within 7 days to present (a) procedures for remarking of entrance exam scripts and (b) regulations specifying how qualified Law faculties can be designated for students to have tuition for the professional law course in accordance with Articles 23, 25 and 38 of the 1992 constitution and Sections 13(2) and 14 of Act 32.
3. We demand that the repeat policy at the Ghana School of Law be scrapped;
4. We demand that the remarking fee at the Ghana School of Law be reduced and pegged at GHC300 per paper;
5. In compliance with the High Court order in the Ganaku case, we demand that the GLC abolishes the undertaking students are compelled to sign annually to NOT challenge the results of the the School’s entrance exam. An undertaking declared by the Court to be illegal and arbitrary cannot continue to be administered.
6. We demand that the GLC and the Independent Exam Committee (IEC) publish IMMEDIATELY the marking scheme for the 2021 entrance exam.

“Going to Court is a trap”

Meanwhile the leader of the 499 students who have been denied admission, Mr. Tony Blair, has told Dennislaw News that the group will be forced to go to court if their demands are not satisfactorily met.

However, he indicated that going to court may be a trap because the school’s authorities may decide to stop negotiations and ask that the long, winding processes of court be followed, by whose end the outcome may not be relevant for their interests anymore.

“The last resort is to go to court. But as leader of the 499 students, together with my colleagues, we have seen that to be some kind of a trap. Because, if you go to court right now, they will say that, okay, if you have sent the case to court, then let the court decide on the case. Then you are going to battle it at court, for how long it will be, your colleagues would have been lawyers.”

Mr. Blair added that his colleagues are at a disadvantage because the members of the GLC are the same persons who wield the most influence in Ghana’s justice system.

“We want to go to court, but we are also cautious, especially with the body that we are dealing with, the General Legal Council. If you know the sort of, and caliber of men and women on that council, you will be cautious a bit because this is a council with the Chief Justice as the Chairman, the Attorney General and deputy all there, together with senior Supreme Court judges. They are to regulate law studies in Ghana.”