Sir Frederik Gordon Roy Ward OBE is a retired British judge who has served in various countries of the Commonwealth.
He was educated in England, obtaining a BSc in botany, zoology and geology, and then taught biology in Northern Ireland.
Ward studied law and was called to the bar at the Middle Temple and practiced from chambers in London for 12 years.
[3] In 1995 he moved to serve as a judge in Cyprus before returning in 1998 to serve a second term as Chief Justice of Tonga, resigning in 2004 in protest at attempts to ban the Times of Tonga newspaper, a paper unsympathetic to the government, a move which he considered to be unconstitutional.
[8] The Chief Justice was forced to conduct the legal proceedings by email as a consequence of being unable to travel from New Zealand to Tuvalu via Fiji as the Fijian regime refused to provide Sir Gordon Ward with a visa that allowed him to travel from New Zealand to Fiji and then to transit to Tuvalu.