Bar Exams: Independent Examination Board is an illegal body – Foh Amoaning

A senior Law Lecturer at the Ghana School of Law, Moses Foh Amoaning, has indicated that the Independent Examinations Body (IEB) that conducts examinations for law students at the Ghana School of Law is an illegal body.

According to him, the apex court of the land, the Supreme Court, has ruled that the IEB was not known to statues, and therefore is illegal. This he said makes any examinations conducted by the IEB after the ruling questionable.

Mr Amonaing explained that the General Legal Council (GLC) should have gone to parliament to seek an amendment of Act 32 which guide legal education in the country before the establishment of the IEB. To the extent that that was not done, the IEB cannot conduct any examination for law students.

His comments come on the heels of agitations by some law students over the results of the 2017 Bar exams conducted by the IEB in which only 91 students out of 474 students, representing 19 percent of the total students passed.

The students on Wednesday, 21 February 2018, wore red armed bands to protest against the development.

Out of the 474 students who wrote the exams, a total of 206 are to repeat the entire course after failing. Another 177 students have been referred in one or two papers.

The Student Representative Council (SRC) of GSL is convinced the results could not have been the true reflection of the exams written by the students.

The SRC is therefore demanding remarking of all the failed papers with a drastic reduction in the remarking fee from GHS3000 to GHS500.

Commenting on this development in an interview with Chief Jerry Forson, host of the Ghana Yensom show on Accra 100.5FM on Thursday, 22 February 2018, Mr Amoaning said: “We saw this problem coming. There were some reforms in legal education that we didn’t get right. For instance if you want to remove and add different courses to legal education in the country, you needed to have done an academic audit to find out whether these courses we are introducing or removing from the system will help the country’s professional legal education or not. We didn’t ask questions like these.

“Courses like Banking & Finance, Insurance Law, taxation and Industrial law were all removed from the legal education but we didn’t ask questions before removing them. That is one aspect of the reforms we didn’t do well.”

On the conduct of examinations by the IEB, Mr Amoaning said: “Some of us wrote to the General Legal Council that this will create a problem for the country. The Independent Examinations Board is not known to statutes.

“The GLC should have gone to parliament to Amend Act 32 when it decided to introduce the IEB. Failure to do that made the IEB an illegal body and the Supreme Court has made that clear.

“Some of us cautioned the GLC on this matter but they didn’t listen to us. I wrote to the Director of Legal Education to draw his attention to the fact that the Supreme Court has declared the IEB an illegal body and so they should rather allow the Ghana School of Law itself to conduct its own examinations but they didn’t listen to me.”