Joseph Bawa Akamba

Joseph Bawa Akamba is a retired Justice of the Supreme Court of Ghana, where he sat from 2012 to 2016 after about forty years in the Judicial Service. He was born in Kumasi on 6 June 1946.

He went to Ghana College and the Government Secondary School in Tamale, and taught at Tamale Business School before reading law at the University of Ghana. He qualified in 1974, worked as an assistant state attorney and joined the bench as a district magistrate in 1977.

He became a circuit judge in 1984 and a High Court judge in 1989. From 1994 to 1999 he was Director of Public Prosecutions in The Gambia and then sat on the Gambian Court of Appeal, returning to Ghana's Court of Appeal in 2001. He chaired the inquiry into the 1993 Tamale riots and the 2006 inquiry into the Ghana School of Law, was president of the Association of Magistrates and Judges in 2007, and acted as director of the Judicial Training Institute from 2008 to 2011. President Mahama swore him in as a Supreme Court justice on 11 November 2012.