Short was born to Joseph Short, a Sierra Leonean lawyer and Wilhelmina Short, nee Smith, a Fante who was of partial Sierra Leonean descent through her paternal grandfather, Francis Smith (judge), a justice on the Supreme Court of the Gold Coast.
London School of Economics.
Emile Short was called to the Bar in England in 1966. The following year, he obtained a Masters degree in Law (LL M) from the London School of Economics and Political Science. He has been a lecturer at the University of Cape Coast in the Central Region of Ghana.
He has also lectured at the Middlesex Polytechnic in London, United Kingdom.
He has also been a consultant for the United Nations Development Programme United Nations Development Programme, the Commonwealth Secretariat in London, and the Carter Center in the United States. He was appointed the Commissioner for Human Rights and Administrative Justice in Ghana at the beginning of the Fourth Republic in 1993 by President Jerry Rawlings.
Prior to working with CHRAJ, he was the head of a law firm in Ghana. In 2004, he took indefinite leave from his position at CHRAJ to be the Ad Litem Judge with the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda at Arusha in Tanzania after he had been elected to that position by the United Nations General Assembly.
This was during the prosecution for war crimes in Rwanda.
He returned to his position at CHRAJ in August 2009. He retired in December 2010. Short has also advised on international law, human rights and administrative justice on various occasions.
He is also a member of the Bar in Ghana and Sierra Leone.
