ISLAMABAD: A senior member of the Pakistan Bar Council (PBC) has highlighted the need to regulate entry to the country’s law schools, in the wake of the growing number of incidents of intimidation and violence by lawyers’ groups against judges, police officers and the media.

In a set of proposals that may be taken up at the next PBC meeting, Advocate Raheel Kamran Sheikh fears that if the worsening situation — such as the unfortunate rowdyism recently displayed by lawyers in Lahore High Court — was not checked, no court premises could escape this madness.

Advocate Sheikh also regretted that the bar councils in Pakistan had miserably failed to arrest this apartheid in the legal profession, and called on bar councils to frame new policies on the basis of essential evidence and statistics.

There is a dire need to statistically study the social background, skills and earning capacities of lawyers to regulate the profession, he said.

Mr Sheikh emphasized the need to reform the measures regulating entry to law schools in a way that the number of seats in law colleges should remain in proportion to the total number of lawyers in the bar who had ten years of standing and were available to train new entrants.

Similarly, the rules for granting affiliation to law colleges must be standardised across the board and voluntary training sessions and lectures by already licensed lawyers should be introduced at the district and high court bar-level, he opined.

He was of the view that of the five-year LLB degree, the final year must be devoted exclusively to practicing advocates teaching the application of law and procedure. This is important because the graduates must have some knowledge base and acquire some basic skills before leaving campus, Mr Sheikh said.

About the issuance process of licences to practice, the PBC member has sought the implementation of an entry test, which should be passed with a certain percentage of marks. Such a test must be conducted by an organisation other than the provincial bar council, such as the Higher Education Commission.

Published in Dawn, September 17th, 2017