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A Focus on Human Rights Issues in Kenya

BY Soko Directory Team · December 8, 2015 11:12 am

The Human Rights Day will be marked on the 10th of December this year. This day will be marked in collaboration with the Canadian Embassy. All human beings are born free, goes the old saying, having equality in dignity and rights as stated in article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

While Kenya has been trying to respect human rights as stipulated by the constitution, there is still a wide range of human rights violations in the country. As the Human Rights day nears, there is little to celebrate concerning the issue of human rights in Kenya.

Kenya’s efforts to tackle an increasing array of security threats especially from the terrorist group, Alshabaab, have been marred with massive corruption as well as many incidences of human rights violations especially by the Kenyan security forces. There have been increased extrajudicial killings, arbitrary detentions of those suspected as well as reported cases of torture at the hands of police personnel.

The government has often been blamed for being sluggish in investigating issues raised against the violations of the human rights especially by the security forces. For a very long time, there has been little or no tangible progress on the accountability for crimes committed during the infamous post-election violence of the year 2007-2008 that left at least 1,100 dead and a total of 650,000 internally displaced and homeless.

The constitution also gives Kenyans the freedom of association, something that has only remained in writing but not exactly in practice. Civil societies have often complained about the level of brutality that the security forces channel towards demonstrators during protests and demonstrations. Early this year, the police fired teargas among Lang’ata Primary School kids who had come out to protest a ‘private developer’s move to try and take away their school playing grounds.

Just few weeks ago, a mass grave was uncovered in Mandera. Unconfirmed reports indicate that these people may have been killed by the security forces in cases related to terrorism. Although the government has promised to look into the matter, people have little hope of anything coming out of it because there have been such cases before.

There is also the suppression of the freedom of the press, the efforts to adopt the laws that are likely to criminalize the freedom of expression as well as some punitive approaches taken by the government to manage the civil society.

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