President Nana Akufo-Addo has announced Supreme Court Justice Sophia A.B. Akuffo as new Chief Justice.
Announcing the appointment, The president said he had known Justice Sophai Akufo for more than forty years and that she impressed him considerably with “her hard work, her capacity for detailed research, her independent of mind and spirit, her honesty and integrity, her deep seated respect for the rule of law and her abiding believe in the sovereignty of Almighty God”
He continued that he has “no doubt that Justice Sophia Akufo will be a worthy successor to Chief Justice Wood, I expect discipline, fairness, integrity, and continuing modernization of judicial activities to be the hallmarks for her tenure as Chief Justice.”
Sophia Akuffo trained as a lawyer under Nana Akufo-Addo and had her Masters in Law (LLM) from the Harvard University in the United States.
She was appointed to the Apex Court by former President Jerry Rawlings twenty years ago, and has been a member of the Governing Committee of the Commonwealth Judicial Education Institute and the Chairperson of the Alternative Dispute Resolution Task Force.
In January 2006 she was elected one of the first judges of the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights initially elected for two years, she was subsequently re-elected until 2014. She rose to become a Vice-President and later President of the African Court.
She has written The Application of Information & Communication Technology in the Judicial Process – the Ghanaian Experience, a presentation to the African Judicial Network Ghana (2002).
One of her famous cases is when she presided over the Montie 3 in 2016. She remarked while reading her judgement ‘even the president cannot control judges’.
Current Chief Justice, Georgina Theodora Wood is leaving office in June after a 10 year service as the head of the third arm of government, the Judiciary.
