THE Majority Leader and Leader of Government Business, Mr Mahama Ayariga, has urged universities offering law degrees to maintain the required standards that will enable their students to sit the Bar Examination.

According to Mr Ayariga, adherence to standards was critical to improving legal education in the country and formed a key part of the Legal Education Reform Bill, 2025, which seeks to allow accredited universities to run professional law programmes.

“What government has decided to propose to this House to consider is that since we have liberalised tertiary education and we have many private universities offering law degrees and they’ve been accredited to offer those degrees, then we cannot maintain a monopoly of the legal education programme in the Ghana School of Law,” he said.

“All the universities, if they meet the appropriate criteria and standards, will also be accredited to run programmes that will allow their products to automatically write the Bar Examination,” Mr Ayariga said while contributing to the debate on the Bill on the floor of Parliament yesterday.

“The only thing is that we must ensure that all those universities that offer law degrees maintain the requisite standards because we don’t also want, in the process of liberalising, to allow standards to fall,” he added.

Mr Ayariga noted that training at the Ghana School of Law alone could not guarantee the maintenance of professional standards, stressing that the vigilance of judges in the courts was also crucial in ensuring that practising lawyers conducted themselves appropriately.

He further indicated that the proposed Bill would neither guarantee an easy passage of the Bar Examination nor automatically increase enrolment at the Law School.

Moreover, the Majority Leader said the issue of increasing numbers lay with the General Legal Council, the regulator of legal education and the legal profession in the country.

However, he noted that increasing the number of lawyers was necessary, considering the ratio of lawyers to Ghana’s population.

“We need to increase the numbers so that district assemblies, companies, corporations and traditional authorities can all have access to lawyers because in all these places where there is some administration of justice, what happens invariably is that the absence of lawyers tends to delay proceedings and speedy trials,” Mr Ayariga said.He, therefore, assured that Parliament would ensure the passage of the Bill to allow law degree holders to be called to the Bar.