No need to hire foreign lawyers

THE EDITOR: Every year the University of the West Indies (UWI) and the Hugh Wooding Law School turn away hundreds of candidates, mainly nationals, applying to enter to pursue studies in law. UWI has set extremely high standards for entrance.

Similarly, the law school every year turns away hundreds of students who, though having attained law degrees, are not accepted either for failing the entrance exam or for not having a recommender of a suitably high social status.

Now it has been announced by the Government that there are plans to hire lawyers from other countries to staff the DPP Office. So what has become of the highly educated and socially acceptable graduates of the Hugh Wooding Law School? Is working as a state attorney too unattractive, especially when having to interact with the everyday common criminal?

To compound the problem, I understand there is the intention to replace the police prosecutors at the magistrates courts with attorneys from the said understaffed DPP Department. Wouldn’t this result in additional strain on the treasury?

These police officers are already being paid with taxpayers’ dollars and though they would be reassigned to other duties, wouldn’t it have cost less and better benefit the country to offer these police prosecutors scholarships to become qualified as attorneys instead of having to contract foreigners to do the work the officers have been doing for so many years?

Also, why hasn’t UWI and the law school considered external programmes to cater for the limited capacity for in-person tuition? The larger universities of the world all see the benefit of external online programmes, so why hasn’t our local university done likewise in the field of law?

I dread to think that this faculty is bent on limiting the amount of law graduates so that there will always be excessive demand with the result of higher cost to employ them.

It appears there is a concerted plan to use a lot of taxpayers’ dollars to issue lucrative contracts to the selected few while the public servants are left to battle with the CPO for reasonable salary increases with the ever rising cost of living.

When will this advantage stop?

CLEMENT MARSHALL

via e-mail

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