Keta
About three hours east of Accra, between lagoon and sea, with Fort Prinzenstein being eaten by the ocean.
Ghana-Net.com · People of Ghana · Women of Ghana · Lomé, Keta & Accra · 1918–1996
When she said she wanted to study law, people told her it was too much for a woman. She became the first woman lawyer from the Gold Coast, the first woman High Court judge in Ghana and one of the first anywhere in the Commonwealth, the first woman on Ghana's Court of Appeal, and then its president. At the United Nations she drafted the declaration that became the world's women's rights treaty. After the 1966 coup she was the judge who went through the bank accounts of Nkrumah's ministers. Annie Jiagge is one of the most important Ghanaians of the twentieth century, and one of the least known.
Annie Ruth Baëta was born on 7 October 1918 in Lomé, until 1914 the capital of the German colony of Togo, then under Allied occupation after the First World War. She was Ewe, one of eight children of Henrietta Baëta, a teacher, and the Reverend Robert Domingo Baëta, a Presbyterian minister of the church that grew out of the German Bremen Mission. The Baëtas were one of the notable Ewe families; her brother Christian Baëta became a leading theologian.
She grew up largely with her grandmother in Keta, the lagoon town on the Gold Coast side of the border, and went to school there before going on to Achimota. The division of the Ewe between two colonies, told on our page on German Togoland and the 1956 plebiscite, ran through her own life.
She first worked in education, and she was active in the Young Women's Christian Association, rising to its world executive committee while still a student. When she decided to become a lawyer, relatives and friends tried to talk her out of it. She went to London anyway, telling them she would come home if she failed the first examination. She did not fail. She was called to the Bar in 1950, the first woman from the Gold Coast to qualify as a lawyer.
A dangerous time to be a judge: she presided over Ghana's appeal court in the years when Rawlings's PNDC set up people's tribunals outside the courts, and when judges were abducted and killed. She retired in 1983.
After the coup of February 1966, the National Liberation Council appointed her to chair the commission investigating the assets of senior public servants and named political leaders of the Nkrumah years: the Jiagge Commission. Its hearings examined how ministers and party officials had acquired houses, cars, bank balances and businesses.
How to read it: the commission exposed real enrichment. It was also part of the new military government's effort to discredit the old one. The judge who had been appointed by Nkrumah was now examining his ministers. See Ghana's coups, 1966–1983.
From 1962 to 1972 she represented Ghana on the UN Commission on the Status of Women. In 1966 she was elected its rapporteur, and in 1968 its chair.
In 1966–67 the Commission was asked to prepare a single document on discrimination against women. Annie Jiagge drafted the working text. It became the Declaration on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, adopted by the UN General Assembly on 7 November 1967.
What it led to: the Declaration was the direct forerunner of the binding Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), adopted in 1979 and now ratified by almost every country in the world. Ghana signed it in 1980. The women's rights treaty the world uses today began on the desk of a judge from Keta.
From 1993, when the Fourth Republic began, she sat on the Council of State, which advises the president. She was awarded the Grand Medal. Justice Annie Jiagge died in Accra on 12 June 1996, aged 77.
Since 2009 the Ministry of Women and Children has held Justice Annie Jiagge Memorial Lectures, and Achimota named a boarding house after her. Beyond those, she is barely known to the Ghanaians whose rights she helped to write.
About three hours east of Accra, between lagoon and sea, with Fort Prinzenstein being eaten by the ocean.
And our Volta site HoInGhana.com. Nearby: Hogbetsotso, the Anlo festival at Anloga.
Across the border at Aflao. See Ghana and Togo.
Where a boarding house now carries her name.
Few Ghanaians have shaped the world as directly as Annie Jiagge, and few are so little remembered at home. She broke into a profession that told her it was not for women, rose to the top of the judiciary through coups and revolutions, and put her name to the first global statement that discrimination against women is a violation of human rights. Her assets commission of 1966 served a military government as well as the truth, and she served under regimes of every kind. But the treaty that grew from her draft now binds almost every state on earth. Every Ghanaian schoolgirl should know her name.
Verified: 29 September 2026. Her birth in Lomé on 7 October 1918, her parents, schooling in Keta and at Achimota, her call to the Bar in 1950, her appointments as magistrate (1953), Circuit Court judge (1959), High Court judge (1961) and Court of Appeal judge (1969), her presidency of the Court of Appeal (1980–83), her chairing of the 1966 assets commission, her UN work from 1962 to 1972 and the Declaration of 7 November 1967, her WCC presidency from 1975, the 1975 National Council on Women and Development, her Council of State service from 1993, and her death on 12 June 1996 follow the Dictionary of African Biography, the University of Birmingham, GhanaWeb and published biographies. Corrections welcome and will be published in full.