Josiah Ofori Boateng

Josiah Ofori Boateng was a judge who chaired the Interim Electoral Commission that ran the 1992 referendum and elections at the start of the Fourth Republic, and later sat on the Supreme Court. He was born at Aburi on 4 January 1931, the son of a Presbyterian minister, and died on 20 April 2008.

He went to Achimota School, the University College of the Gold Coast and University College London, and was called to the English bar at Lincoln's Inn in 1963. He was an assistant state attorney and then a solicitor with Gaisie, Scheck and Company in Sekondi-Takoradi, became a district magistrate in 1966, deputy judicial secretary in 1969 and director of research at the Law Reform Commission in 1973. After a Ford Foundation fellowship at Harvard he worked at the UN Environment Programme in Nairobi from 1976 to 1981, then returned to head the Ghana School of Law as Director of Legal Education.

He joined the Court of Appeal in 1989. In March 1992 he became chairman of the Electoral Commission, with Kwadwo Afari-Gyan as his deputy, and supervised the constitutional referendum and the 1992 elections before returning to the bench in 1993. He was sworn in as a Supreme Court justice on 15 April 1999 and retired on 4 January 2001. His brother was the geographer E. A. Boateng, and his wife Sabina Ofori Boateng is a lawyer.