Dr Dominic Akuritinga Ayine, the Attorney General and Minister of Justice, has warned the Ghana Bar Association (GBA) against allowing political parties to influence the positions of professional bodies.
According to Ayine, the Ghana Bar Association (GBA) and the newly established Ghana Law Society bodies must be able to speak independently on matters concerning the rule of law and governance.
He argued that the legal profession could lose its authority if it is seen as representing the interests of a political party.
Speaking at the maiden Ghana Law Society Annual Bar Conference on September 30, 2026, Dr Ayine stated, “A bar whose views on matters affecting the welfare of our country oscillate like a pendulum, depending on the political weather, inevitably ends up looking like the mouthpiece of a particular political party and its interests rather than the public interest it exists to serve”.
“It does not matter whether an association is a decade old, like the Ghana Bar Association, or like the Ghana Law Society; a newly built building is an institutional voice. The moment any of you allows itself to become the appendage of a political party, whichever party that may be, and it doesn’t matter if it is my own National Democratic Congress, you forfeit the very authority that makes your advocacy worth listening to,” he stated.
“A judge does not ask which party appointed a lawyer before her. The public should never have to ask which party an association speaks for before it credits what that association says about the rule of law and governance in our society,” he noted.
He further added, “I want to be equally direct about the other side of that bargain, because independence is not something that a profession can simply declare into being while government withholds it. I said at Ada that the demand for a bar’s independence must come with a demand on the state itself for responsibility from interference that allows this profession to govern itself.
“As Attorney General, I do not want a bar, and for that matter a law society, that agrees with everything my office does. An Attorney General who seeks constant agreement from the legal profession has clearly misunderstood his own job,” he added.
“What I want, what this country needs, is a profession that is visible and present in public discourse that speaks its mind on the state of our laws, our courts, and what that does from a footing that no party can claim to be its own,” he urged.
In other news, former Ghana Bar Association (GBA) President Yaw Acheampong Boafo has alleged that Ghana is currently training lawyers in a manner that is contrary to the law.
According to Mr Boafo, recent reforms in legal education were pushed largely by individuals outside the existing system, resulting in those within the system being sidelined during the reform process.
Yaw Acheampong Boafo argued that although legislation has created a statutory body to oversee legal education, the body has not yet been formally established.
He claimed that the Chief Justice and the Attorney General have instead assumed powers that should ordinarily be exercised by the yet-to-be-established body.
“Currently, we are training lawyers contrary to the law. It is not about disagreement with the current system. You can do the right thing the wrong way,” he said.
Mr Boafo further alleged that a pre-bar course had been introduced and institutions accredited without the necessary legal foundation.
“The push for reforms came from people outside the system, and they made those within the system enemies of the process,” he stated.
The former GBA President further warned that training lawyers outside the framework of the law could create a troubling precedent.
“Now, when we start training lawyers illegally, what we’ve told them is that it is convenient for you to displace the law,” he warned.
He further attributed the situation to what he described as the exclusion of experienced stakeholders from the reform process.
“Those within the system were seen as enemies of the state. So, when the law was being reformed, those in the system were sidelined, and people sitting in Florida woke up one morning and, writing in big English, were telling us how to run the system,” he added.
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