Mabel Agyemang

Mabel Maame Agyemang is a Ghanaian judge who became the first woman Chief Justice of The Gambia in 2013 and was appointed Chief Justice of the Turks and Caicos Islands in 2020.

She went to Wesley Girls' High School, studied at the University of Ghana and the Ghana School of Law, and was called to the bar in 1987. She joined the bench soon afterwards and sat in Accra, Cape Coast, Koforidua, Kumasi and Tema, was vice-president of the Association of Magistrates and Judges from 1996 to 2000, and became a High Court judge in 2002.

From 2004 the Commonwealth Secretariat sent her abroad as an expert judge: four years on the High Court of The Gambia, two in Eswatini, where she ruled on the right to free education, and then the Gambian Court of Appeal. President Yahya Jammeh made her Chief Justice in August 2013 and removed her without explanation in February 2014, a dismissal widely linked to her defence of judicial independence. She returned to Ghana's Court of Appeal, and in 2020 the governor of the Turks and Caicos Islands appointed her Chief Justice, praising her for standing up to Jammeh. She took office on 1 April 2020. She is married with two children.