Justice Emmanuel Ekundayo Roberts has been a judge of Sierra Leone’s Court of Appeal since 2007 and on 19 December 2014 was appointed to the Supreme Court of Sierra Leone. Since 2005, ha has also been a Lecturer in Civil Procedure at the Sierra Leone Law School. From 2003 to 2007 he worked as a Legal Consultant at the Law Officers Department in Freetown. From 1991 to 2002 he was a lawyer in private practice including from 2001 to 2002, as head of the firm Roberts and Partners. He received his LLB (Hons) from Fourah Bay College, University of Sierra Leone in 1989 and his BL in 1990 from the Sierra Leone Law School. In 2010, he was made a Fellow of the Commonwealth Judicial Education Institute in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. He was appointed a Judge of the Residual Special Court for Sierra Leone in 2013, and served as Staff Appeals Judge from December 2016 to December 2018.
In 2022, he was elected as Vice President of the RSCSL.
He holds an LLM from Duke University, USA. He is a trained Mediator (National Judicial College, Nevada, USA) and a member of the World Mediation Organisation. He is chairman of the sub- committee on mediation in Sierra Leone and former chair of the sub-committee on the Review of the Arbitration Law in Sierra Leone.
In September 2022 he was elected Vice President (West Africa Region) of the Commonwealth Magistrates and Judges Association (CMJA). He is a Council Member and Trustee of the CMJA.
He is the inaugural winner of the Judge Patrick Flanagan Scholarship Award (Judicial Education) presented in 2019 by the National Judicial College, USA.
In July 2022 Justice Roberts was made Vice Chairperson and a writer of the Africa Regional Intellectual Property Bench Book Project which is supported by the US Department of Justice, The Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement (INL) and the African Regional Intellectual Property Organisation (ARIPO).
He is a founding member of the African Judicial Educators Network on Environmental Law (AJENEL).