Martin Kpebu

Martin Luther Kpebu is an Accra lawyer and one of Ghana's best-known voices on criminal justice, bail rights and accountability. He is known for Supreme Court cases that changed how bail and detention work in Ghana, and for commentary that spares neither party. He was born in Accra on 15 October 1978.

Education and practice

Kpebu went to St Charles Minor Seminary before the University of Ghana, where he took a business degree in banking and finance in 2002 and a law degree in 2005. He qualified at the Ghana School of Law and was called to the bar in 2007, and later earned an LLM in oil and gas law from the University of Ghana in 2013.

He spent more than a decade at the Accra firm Fugar and Co. and later founded Black Star Legal Services. Alongside practice he has lectured law for years, at Accra Technical University, Central University and the University of Ghana.

Bail and detention cases

His name is attached to two Supreme Court rulings that affect anyone arrested in Ghana. In 2016 he successfully challenged the statutory ban on bail for certain serious offences, a ruling that made every offence bailable in principle and left the decision to the courts. In 2019 he won a case on the constitutional rule that a suspect must be brought before a court within 48 hours, which clarified how weekends and public holidays count towards that limit. He has also campaigned against the jailing of sureties when a suspect absconds.

He founded the Juvenile Justice Project, which gives free legal representation to young people in Accra, and has raised funds for journalists injured in the course of their work.

ORAL and the Special Prosecutor

After the 2024 election, Kpebu was named to President-elect John Mahama's transition team as part of Operation Recover All Loot (ORAL), the committee set up to gather evidence of corruption and track looted state assets.

He has since become one of the sharpest critics of the Office of the Special Prosecutor under Kissi Agyebeng, accusing it of procedural failures, including in the investigation of former finance minister Ken Ofori-Atta. On 3 December 2025, when he went to the OSP over allegations he had made against the Special Prosecutor, he clashed with officers at the gate and was detained for several hours before being granted bail. He has said he does not want the Special Prosecutor's job himself, and in 2026 argued that "Kissi Agyebeng is the problem, not the OSP".

A critic of both sides

Although he worked with Mahama's transition team, Kpebu has been equally blunt about the new government. In August 2026 he said the Mahama administration had arrested more people over free speech in its first eighteen months than the Akufo-Addo government had in eight years. In September 2026 he called EOCO's attempt to arrest Manhyia South MP Nana Agyei Baffour Awuah at the Accra High Court "a retrogression in our quest for a better democracy", arguing that agencies should go through the Speaker to reach an MP.