Ghana's Deputy Commissioner: Anna Bossman

After waiting in front of the computer for a few minutes, quickly jotting down a few more questions to ask, I click the video-call button on Skype and wait for Anna Bossman to pick up the call. I’m greeted with a warm hello as her bright smile shines through the computer screen. It’s been about two months since I’ve last seen and spoken to her, the last time being a delicious dinner with her and her daughter, my good friend Maria Bossman-Damiba in a dim lit restaurant in the Financial District aw we enjoy the last few weeks of summer vacation. This week she has return to New York City to take part in Fordham University’s International Law Week.

As Ghana’s Deputy Commissioner of Legal and Investigative for the Commission of Human Rights and Administrative Justice (CHMAJ), Ms. Bossman was chosen to take part in a lecture and panel for one of the biggest university law events in the nation. Her first time taking part in such a huge event at Fordham, Ms. Bossman spent over thirty years to get to where she’s at and as she speaks about her career, the passion she has for law and human rights can be easily identified.

As a prominent human rights advocate, Ms. Bossman, 53, has only been deputy commissioner for eight years, the other twenty-two years were spent in different positions. Her resume is quite extensive. Upon graduating, she quickly began her career in the Ministry of Justice as a prosecutor for the state attorney and afterwards joined a corporate law firm as a lawyer. By the mid-1980’s Ms. Bossman moved to Gabon working in a small oil company called British Gas where she was meeting with international oil buyers. In 1997, she returned to Ghana and opened her own consulting law firm, Bossman Consultancy Limited, BCL, taking on different types of clients from business companies to entrepreneurs to solitary clients by representing and managing their legal work. It was not until 2002 when Ms. Bossman was appointed by then-President John Agyekum Kuffuor as deputy commissioner, (she had taken over as Chair Commissioner from 2004-2009 as the current chair commissioner was away in Arusha on a committee dealing with national reconciliation and reparation for Rwanda).

From the looks of it, it seems like Ms. Bossman has always had her mind set to law, but truthfully she never saw herself in law. Originally, Ms. Bossman wanted to focus on linguistics, wanting to learn Russian, German, and Spanish to add on to the languages she already has mastered (English, French, and the Ghanian dialect Ga), and possibly becoming a linguist or translator. Ms. Bossman reveals that the reason she got in law was because of human rights, “Due to [Ghana]’s poverty, women’s rights and children’s rights are not being seen as issues and I wanted to create awareness within the public.”

It did not take long for her work to get recognition. For the past four years, the Commission of Human Rights and Administrative Justice has played host to Fordham University law students in a month-long summer internship program in Accra, Ghana. While the students take part in various works, Ms. Bossman gives about three to four lectures to the students about the work she does. As a result, the university has invited to her International Law Week. An intensive two-day event, Ms. Bossman gave a lecture entitled “Protecting Human Rights through National Commission: The Commission on Human Rights and Administrative Justice of Ghana.” Not her first time giving a university lecture, previously doing so at the Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, John Hopkins University, and at her Alma Mater the University of Ghana, Ms. Bossman reveals that she enjoys traveling and giving lectures about human rights and administrative justice.

Her daughter Maria Bossman-Damiba knows how dedicated she is to her work. “She is making a difference and sometimes I feel like she doesn’t think she is but it’s the little things that count,” Bossman-Damiba states.

Those little things have recently gotten Ms. Bossman invited by the Governor of Ghana to take part in a panel involving her previous work, concerning the development of oil and gas in the country.

So does she see herself in law for the rest of her life? "I still see myself in human rights, possibly opening my consulting firm again in the future," Ms. Bossman said.

For now, Ms. Bossman will continue her advocacy for Ghana's human rights and administrative justice. "The work she does, especially in a country like Ghana where it's still very traditional yet in the process of westernization, there's a bit of a generation divide and she's trying to break that barriern" Bossman-Damiba said.

With so much work to do but not enough hands to do it all, "you must have a passion for €€€€€it," Ms. Bossman adds. And that passion Ms. Bossman talks about, she definitely has.