[6] He was named after his paternal great-uncle, James Emman Kwegyir Aggrey, the Gold Coast educator who co-founded Achimota School.
[6] Aggrey-Orleans studied French at the University of Bordeaux and pursued a four-year research postgraduate course in politics and diplomacy.
[6] He was appointed the Special Political Advisor to the United Nations Peacekeeping Operations in la Côte d'Ivoire.
He was Ghana's High Commissioner to the United Kingdom and Ambassador to the Republic of Ireland from October 1997 to March 2001.
[6] 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.”[12][15] He was married to Agnes Y. Aggrey-Orleans (née Bartels), a fellow diplomat.
He was an external patron of Club UK, a social organisation for Diaspora Ghanaians from the United Kingdom.