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Jul 07, 2014 News
– Caricom considering changes to UWI Council of Legal Education
The 35th meeting of the Caribbean Community (Caricom) Heads of Government has concluded and among other things the comprehensive review of legal education in the West Indies was discussed.
Attorney General Anil Nandlall who was present at the meeting outlined that talks are ongoing to ascertain whether the University of the West Indies Council of Legal Education should continue to operate the way it does or whether changes should be made.
This has to be taken against the backdrop of what recently occurred where the 2014 law students from the University of Guyana (UG) had lost their automatic placement within the Hugh Wooding Law School in Trinidad and Tobago even though there was an agreement between UWI’s Council of Legal Education and UG that every year, 25 automatic placements were offered by the Council to UG for entry into the said School.
The government, however, through its Attorney General, made advances to have that decision rescinded and was successful in its endeavour following a meeting at the Turkeyen, Greater Georgetown, Caricom Secretariat that involved Caricom Secretary General Ambassador Irwin LaRocque.
The meeting, which was instigated by President Donald Ramotar, specifically addressed the protracted impasse affecting the local law students’ entry to the Trinidad based law school and the review of legal education in the West Indies.
Nandlall had disclosed that “it was decided that the top 25 Guyanese Nationals, graduates of the University of Guyana Law Programme, 2013, will enjoy automatic entry into Hugh Wooding Law School, for the academic year commencing September 2014-2015.”
An additional 10 students who are non-Guyanese nationals graduating out of the said programme will secure automatic entry to the Norman Manley Law School in Jamaica or Eugene Dupuch Law School in Bahamas, depending on which zone their territory falls.
Nandall said that as the situation currently stands, the Heads of Government are contemplating whether the law schools in the Region are “adequate to accommodate students studying law in the region because the Council which was established 40 years ago is in charge of a structure that is 40 years old.”
He said that the review will tell us if the structure would be changed… “There are now many universities in the region that are producing law students and offering law degrees outside of the UWI such as the University of Technology in Jamaica, the University of Trinidad and Tobago and University of Guyana. In addition, there are many UK (United Kingdom) universities that offer law degrees, the University of London for example has several centers in Trinidad that teach law to students. So there are many more students now that are being produced outside of the traditional UWI that used to produce the majority of students.”
As such the question of adequacy of the current system will be reviewed and “the whole role of the function, should it be a Council that is managing or running the law school or whether it should be an Accreditation unit,” Nandlall outlined.
He said that the syllabus will also be reviewed because the same syllabus has been used at UWI largely for the last 40 or more years. “The deans of the Caribbean in respect of legal services will also be addressed to see if we can absorb the number of lawyers that are being produced. That is another factor.”
“It’s a very comprehensive review and hopefully the importance of it being done as early as possible was underscored because we have students that graduate annually from various places and the simply do not enjoy guaranteed secured spaces at regional law schools,” said Nandlall.
Contrary to what was announced earlier about Guyana having interest in its own Law School for students completing the Law programme, Nandlall said that the “government of Guyana will continue a solution to this matter at the level of CARCIOM. We will not operate outside of CARICOM. Legal education in the Caribbean is regionally driven and Guyana does not act unilateral of that.”
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