Parliament has finally passed the Legal Education Bill, 2025, after over three months of parliamentary deliberations since it was introduced by the Attorney General (AG) and Minister for Justice, Dr Dominic Ayine, on 3 December 2025.

The passage of the bill marks the end of the Ghana School of Law’s monopoly over professional legal training and opens the sector to accredited universities, among other significant reforms in the country’s legal education system.

Provisions of the Bill

The new law establishes a Council for Legal Education and Training, which will be responsible for regulating legal education and setting curriculum standards across institutions.

Under the new framework, a Law Practice Training Course will be introduced and offered by approved universities to prepare eligible candidates for a National Bar Examination.

During a speech on the floor of Parliament, the Majority Leader, Mahama Ayariga, noted that the passage of the Bill fulfils the National Democratic Congress (NDC)’s commitment to promoting equity, fairness, and improved access to legal education in Ghana.

“As has been typical of the NDC, promises made are delivered. We promised law students that if they vote for us, we will carry out reforms that will ensure equity, fairness and access to legal education,” he said

While the Minority acknowledged the significant milestone, it, however, charged the government to fulfil other promises, such as establishing a bank for women.

The Minority Leader, Alexander Afenyo-Markin, indicated that it has been nearly two years since the government took office, yet one of its flagship manifesto promises, establishing a women’s bank, remains unfulfilled.

“All of us have participated. This is not a bill that is identified with a particular party. I concede that indeed they made it a campaign promise. Mr Speaker, however, they equally promised that they were going to set up a bank for women. We are done with year one, year two, we have not seen the Women Bank,” he said.

Meanwhile, the passage of this bill has been quite swift compared to other major bills which were introduced over the years.

Examples of such bills include the Right to Information Act, the Petroleum Revenue Management Act, and the Affirmative Action Bill.

Ghana’s Parliament passed the Affirmative Action Bill on July 30, 2024. It received Presidential assent in September 2024, nearly two decades after it was first drafted in 2011, and was officially launched on July 31, 2025, at the Accra International Conference Centre.

The Right to Information Act (RTI) was first drafted in 1999, but was only passed on 26 March 2019. It was assented to on 21 May 2019 and came into force on 1 January 2020. This means it took about 20 years from introduction to passage. The long delay was due to political disagreements, concerns about implementation, and repeated postponements.

The Petroleum Revenue Management Act (PRMA) was drafted in 2009 after Ghana’s oil discovery and passed in 2011 as Act 815. It took about two years from drafting to passage. The delay was mainly because of the need for extensive stakeholder consultations to ensure transparency and accountability in how oil revenues would be managed.

The Plant Breeders’ Bill was introduced in 2013; as of 2026, it has still not been passed. The main reason for this delay is strong opposition from farmer groups and civil society organisations. They argue that the Bill threatens seed sovereignty and could favour multinational corporations over local farmers.

In short, while the Legal Education Bill, 2025, moved through Parliament in under four months, these other bills show how reforms can take years, or even decades, when there are political disagreements, complex stakeholder interests, or strong public resistance.