GEORGETOWN, Guyana (CMC) — The Government says the Council of Legal Education (CLE) has approved the country’s request to establish a law school here after years of attempts to do so.

Attorney General Anil Nandlall said the request was “favourably considered”, and the council made a decision to write the Guyana Government “shortly, informing of this decision”.

He said the CLE would be setting out the criteria and other requirements which the Government will have to satisfy.

Guyana has been trying to establish a law school here for more than three decades, and in a statement Nandlall said the Irtfaan Ali Administration has already told the CLE that it would provide the land and buildings to accommodate the school that will be administered by the council.

The approval was made during the CLE meeting held in Barbados earlier this month.

The CLE is the lawful authority for the administering of legal professional education in the Caribbean region. The council does so through its law schools — the Hugh Wooding Law School, St Augustine in Trinidad and Tobago; Norman Manley Law School, Kingston, Jamaica; and Eugene Dupuch Law School, Nassau, The Bahamas.

Under the treaty, only the first top 25 University of Guyana (UG) law degree graduates are allowed to pursue the council’s Certificate in Legal Education, and earlier this year the university called for an increased number of law students from its law faculty to get automatic admission to the Trinidad-based Hugh Wooding Law School.

A Government statement has said that a UG delegation, including its Vice Chancellor Professor Dr Paloma Mohamed Martin, and the head of the Department of Law, Kim Kyte-Thomas, met with Nandlall to discuss the terms of a new agreement with officials of The University of the West Indies and the Council of Legal Education for the continued automatic admissions of UG graduates.

According to the statement, UG wants the number of its students admitted to the Trinidad-based law school increased from 25 to 40, and required also a “settling [of] the number of non-Guyanese graduates of the UG law programme gaining entry into any of the three law schools in the Caribbean region”.