J. E. K. Aggrey-Orleans joined the administrative class of the Ghanaian Foreign and Diplomatic Service in 1963. Between 1966 and 1970, he was a foreign service officer and First Secretary at the Ghana Permanent Mission to the United Nations in New York. He rose through the ranks to become the Chief of State Protocol at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, from 1975 to 1979. His responsibilities at the time involved training diplomats before they set off to their foreign duty posts. He was the Acting Clerk of Parliament between 1979 and 1981, during the regime of Hilla Limann. He also served as the Head of the Parliamentary Service. He was the Deputy Resident Manager of the Volta Aluminium Company in Tema from July 1983 to September 1986. From October 1986 to September 1987, he was a consultant at the World Social Prospects Association in Geneva, Switzerland. He also served as the Assistant Director of Economic Information and Market Intelligence of the International Tropical Timber Organisation, a Yokohama-based commodity organization, established in 1987 by the UN to promote tropical forest conservation and timber trade. He remained in this position from October 1987 to September 1997. He was appointed the Special Political Advisor to the United Nations Peacekeeping Operations in la Cote d’Ivoire. J. E. K. Aggrey-Orleans was a lecturer at the Kofi Annan Peacekeeping Training Centre. He was Ghana’s envoy to the United Kingdom and Ireland from October 1997 to March 2001. He was engaged as a consultant to the African Centre for Economic Transformation, the Parliament of Ghana and the Ghanaian Judiciary. He also spoke at various conferences of the erstwhile Organisation of African Unity, now the African Union in addition to events at the UN, Commonwealth of Nations, Inter-Parliamentary Union. After his retirement from the diplomatic service, he was engaged in the public speaking circuit and maintained close ties with the Foreign Affairs Ministry. In a public lecture, “The Fundamental Principle of Protocol and the Importance of Protocol in Inter-State, Inter-Corporate and Inter-Faith Relations” at the 2017 Protocol Matters Conference in Accra, he was noted to have said “matters of diplomacy must be promoted to what he described as ‘diplomatic behaviour’ in every Ghanaian…adding that everybody in society must be considered an agent of diplomacy, which was a secret tool for successful relations among states, representation of identities as well as negotiations between states and institutions.”
Personal life
He was married to Agnes Y. Aggrey-Orleans, a fellow diplomat. The couple had 2 sons, James E. K. and B. L. Kweku Aggrey-Orleans. He was a lifelong Methodist. He was an external patron of Club UK, a social organisation for Diaspora Ghanaians from the United Kingdom. Aggrey-Orleans was also a Freemason, belonging to the District Grand Lodge of Ghana of the United Grand Lodge of England. His contemporaries in the Masonic Lodge include diplomat, K. B. Asante and the jurist and judge, V.C.R.A.C Crabbe, Otumfuo Osei Tutu II, the Asantehene, the Grand Patron of the Grand Lodge of Ghana; and former President of Ghana, John Agyekum Kufuor, the Senior Grand Warden of the United Grand Lodge of England.
