Its immediate past president, Salim Bashir, said this had been the stand of the Bar for the last 15 to 20 years and there was no shift in its position.
“We will keep pushing for the common bar examination to ensure a high quality of advocacy skills and legal knowledge is maintained,” he told FMT.
Salim said this in response to graduates of the Bachelor of Law and Syariah from Universiti Sains Islam Malaysia (Usim) being now considered qualified practitioners in Malaysia after the programme received recognition from the Legal Profession Qualifying Board.
The higher education ministry, in a statement last week, said the recognition comes following the efforts and commitment of Usim, the higher education department, Malaysian Qualifications Agency and the board, through a joint technical committee set up in 2010.
This exempts graduates from Usim from having to sit for the Certificate in Legal Practice (CLP) examination to become a lawyer in the High Court of Malaya.
The board is the regulatory body that decides on which foreign and local law school degrees are to be recognised.
It also conducts Bahasa Malaysia proficiency courses and the CLP examination for persons whose qualifications are considered insufficient to practise law in Malaysia.
The attorney-general is the board chairman, with two judges, the Bar president and a dean of a law faculty nominated by the higher education ministry making up the rest of the board.
Salim, who is also the co-chairman of the Common Bar Course Committee, said last year, all deans of local law schools met and resolved that a single common examination must be implemented soon.
“We are also in the midst of fine-tuning the common examination module,” he said, adding that all local and foreign graduates would be required to undergo the course and practical training before seeking admission to the Bar.
The board, over the last few years, had allowed seven local public and private universities offering law degrees to exempt their students from sitting for the CLP exam after reviewing their law programmes.
They include Universiti Utara Malaysia (UUM) in Kedah, Multimedia University in Melaka and Universiti Sultan Zainal Abidin in Terengganu.
The only overseas institution that has been fully exempted is the National University of Singapore, while those admitted to the English Bar can return home to complete their nine-month pupillage before being admitted to the Malaysian Bar.
In an interview with FMT last year, retired judge Gopal Sri Ram had also suggested that the board recognise some of the universities in South Asian countries, such as India and Pakistan, which have law courses that are of proven quality.
He said many of Malaysia’s important laws were reproductions of the statutes of India.
Sri Ram had said: “The leading textbooks on the law of contract, evidence, criminal procedure, penal law, civil procedure and constitutional law were all written by Indian authors.”