Elias Kotei

Ghanaian environmental lawyer who pioneered legal frameworks to protect ecosystems and indigenous rights in West Africa.

Elias Kotei (1950–present), a Ghanaian legal scholar, revolutionized environmental law through his 1988 Community Forests Act, which granted local communities ownership over ancestral lands. As founder of West Africa Environmental Justice Institute, he successfully sued multinational corporations for illegal mining in Sierra Leone's jungles. His landmark 1993 case Green Horizon v. Goldcorp set precedents for ecological damage compensation. Kotei's Law of the Land: A Legal Ecology (2005) became a textbook at Oxford University. In 2010, he co-created EcoGuard, an AI platform tracking illegal deforestation. His advocacy inspired the Netflix documentary The Jungle Lawyer (2020). Despite receiving death threats from logging cartels, Kotei remains a global voice for indigenous land rights.