Carlos Valls, panelist in the 5th Annual Conference on Legal Ethics organized by the African Center on Law and Ethics of the Ghana Institute of Management and Public Administration (Accra, Ghana)

Carlos Valls (Immediate Past Co-Chair of the IBA Professional Ethics Committee) spoke last 17 September at the Legal Ethics Programme organised by the African Center on Law and Ethics from Accra, Ghana, together with his colleagues from the IBA Professional Ethics Committee Alessandra Mourão (Brazil), Akua Mirekua Nimako-Boateng (Ghana) and Jeff Merk (Canada), with the special intervention of the internationally prestigious Judge Nene Amegatcher from Ghana. The session, of virtual format, dealt with the IBA International Principles on conduct fot the legal profession, its nature, role, and a brief analysis of the principles. The panellists also discussed the role of IBA as a strong influence in the global legal world and its capacity to create “soft law” and advocate for the rule of law.

Carlos in particular dealt with the asymmetry of information between lawyer and client as the basis for lawyers having to assume a special and more demanding standard of ethics, where the internal motivation to act correctly had to play a particularly key role.