Where We Work
Where We Work
Kenya is facing a legacy of human rights violations perpetrated in the aftermath of the 2007 elections. ICTJ has worked there since 2008 on criminal prosecutions, institutional reform, truth-seeking, and reparations.
Background: A History of Unresolved Violence
Kenya’s December 2007 presidential and parliamentary elections were followed by violence and political unrest. Allegations of electoral manipulation intersected with ethnic tension, and boiled over into fighting, riots, rape and bloodshed. There were 1,100 deaths and widespread destruction and displacement.
In January 2008 the opposing political parties—incumbent Mwai Kibaki’s Party of National Unity (PNU) and Raila Odinga’s Orange Democratic Movement (ODM)—agreed to negotiate.
They established an uneasy peace and called for the establishment of a Commission of Inquiry on Post-election Violence (CIPEV, or Waki Commission) and an Independent Review of the Elections Commission (IREC) to investigate the 2007 elections.
The Waki Commission and IREC completed their work in September and October 2008. Their recommendations included:
- A special tribunal to prosecute perpetrators of post-election violence;
- A constitutional review;
- A Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission (TJRC) to investigate past violations;
- Major police force reform and the merging of Kenya's two police forces—the Administration Police and the Kenya Police Service.
The implementation of these recommendations has begun. A new constitution was adopted in August 2010, and police reforms began in December 2009.
But the pace is slow. The proposed Special Tribunal was never created—the bill was defeated in Parliament in February 2009.
In response, in March 2010, the International Criminal Court (ICC) announced an investigation into Kenya’s post-election violence. On 8 March 2011, the ICC issued summons for six people for crimes against humanity. Kenya has challenged the admissibility of the case against the six on the basis that it plans to conduct national proceedings.
ICTJ's Role:
- Prosecutions: We provide practical advice to the ICC on witness participation. We raise local awareness and understanding of the ICC’s work through outreach and workshops. We convene the coalition of civil society organizations working to support the ICC in Kenya .
- Institutional reform: We monitor reform, and support local organizations' advocacy efforts on police reform. We hold workshops and publish briefing papers for key government departments, civil society and others with an interest in security.
- Truth-seeking: We helped Kenyans successfully lobby for amendments to the amnesty provisions in the bill establishing the TJRC. We took a lead role in successfully pressuring the TJRC’s Chairman, Ambassador Bethuel Kiplagat, to resign after serious allegations of past human rights violations. We support truth seeking from below by building the capacity of local organizations to undertake documentation of human rights violations.
- Reparations: We comprehensively studied the reparative needs of victims of human rights violations from the 1950s to 2008. For the first time, victims voiced their opinions on the direction of Kenya’s unfolding transitional justice process. We will release our report in April 2011.
“What you are doing is very good. We are in fact finding it very useful. We never expected someone to come to us and ask us about everything. So when you place this report before the government we shall even put our bows and arrows aside and be hopeful that they will do something”. (Family member of massacre victims, Mandera county, North-East, speaking about our reparations research)