The First Deputy Speaker of Parliament, Joseph Osei Owusu has directed the General Legal Council to admit the 499 candidates who were denied admission to the Ghana School of Law.
This comes after the House resoundingly voted in support of a motion filed by Deputy Majority Leader, Alexander Afenyo-Markin, which prayed the House to compel the GLC to admit all candidates who passed the entrance examination per the advertised rules.
The Effutu MP had described the actions of the GLC, post the entrance examination, as unacceptable.
According to him, should it be left unaddressed, it would make the law course unattractive to prospective applicants.
He said, “Ghana Law School, General Legal Council must take the views of this Parliament seriously, by quickly taking steps to remedy the situation. This is Parliament, the voice of the people.
“And the representatives of the people are saying that if you said the pass mark is 50 percent, then all those who made 50 percent and above – they are about 400 – it is not too late to admit them because they have passed,” he said on Friday, October 29.
The Minority Chief Whip, Muntaka Mubarak who seconded the motion stated that the conservative position taken by the GLC is retrogressive and does not serve the interest of the country.
“Training a doctor is more critical than training a lawyer because when the person leaves as a doctor, he deals with knives and lives directly while in the theatre. By just one stroke of a mistake, he’ll kill a human being.
“Even that they find a way to go around it to train more annually in this country … and you gatekeep a very conservative and backward system that you can only do this at one place…that it disenfranchises so many people,” he said.
Following the resounding vote in support of the motion, the Speaker of Parliament directed the GLC to “proceed and admit all the students who passed in accordance with the advertised rules of the examination.”
He further directed that the Attorney General assures that the directive is followed to the letter.
Meanwhile, a section of the LLB holders who were denied admission into the Ghana School of Law to read the professional course has dragged the General Legal Council to court.
The candidates claim in their writ that their fundamental human rights have been violated by the regulatory body.
They are therefore praying the Human Rights Division of the Accra High Court to compel the Ghana School of Law to admit them into the institution, having met the required pass mark of (50%) in the entrance exam.
The 143 claimants are part of 499 others who were denied admission.
Despite meeting the 50% pass mark, the school published a retroactive communiqué which indicated that only candidates who scored at least 50% in each of the two sections of the exam were considered for admission.
Therefore, candidates who scored lower than 50% in a section but overperformed in the other section to make up for the weak section, crossed the pass mark of 50% yet were denied admission. The school has stated that its decision is final.
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