Posted: 29 August, 2025 Filed under: Edward Kahuthia Murimi | Tags: 2024 Finance Bill, arbitrary arrests, barbaric governance, CIVICUS, death while in police custody, enforced disappearances, extrajudicial killings, global alliance for civil society organisations, human rights, human rights violations, Kenya, Kenya’s Constitution, Multinational Security Support mission to Haiti, President Ruto, protesters, public policy, Rex Masai, right of peaceful assembly, right to life, rule of law, the right to freedom of expression, watchlist, widespread human rights abuses
Author: Edward Kahuthia Murimi
Advocate of the High Court of Kenya
Introduction
Kenya’s human rights situation has deteriorated in the recent past, and the state-sponsored human rights violations in the country can no longer be ignored. The global alliance for civil society organisations, CIVICUS, has recently added Kenya to its watchlist and rated the country as ‘repressed’ following what the organisation described as ‘a disturbing escalation in state-led repression of civic freedoms’. This article aims to shine a light on escalating human rights violations in Kenya in the hope that an international readership will inform some form of restraint by the authorities. It also highlights the disconnect between Kenya’s theoretical commitments to international human rights norms and processes and the blatant disregard for these same norms in practice. It argues that deliberate resistance is the most realistic response to the current onslaught on the exercise of human rights by President Ruto’s government.
Anti-finance bill protests
The countrywide protests in June 2024 that were largely organised by the youth through social media in rejection of the 2024 Finance Bill have proved to be a turning point for Kenya. The country has since taken a turn for the worse. Evidence abounds of a breakdown of the rule of law and a total disregard for human rights norms that Kenya has committed to domestically and internationally. A report by a group of human rights organisations that included Amnesty International claimed that a total of 61 people lost their lives during the anti-finance bill protests. Demonstrations organised a year later, on 25 June 2025, to commemorate the dead led to the death of an additional 19 protesters and 15 enforced disappearances, according to a statement by the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights (KNCHR). Protests organised on 7 July 2025, a day that commemorates the pro-democracy protests of 1990 that returned Kenya to multi-partyism, were similarly deadly with 38 people losing their lives and 130 injured according to a press release by the KNCHR. Statements from the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights [here] and the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights [here] have called for prompt and independent investigations into the loss of lives occasioned by state and non-state actors and full respect for the rights to freedom of expression, association, and peaceful assembly.
This senseless loss of life, mainly through the use of live ammunition by the police against unarmed protesters, appears state-sanctioned given President Ruto’s recent remarks. He recommended that the police ‘should shoot [protesters’] legs so they break and they can go to hospital on their way to court’. These reckless remarks by the President conveniently ignore the fact that the first person to lose his life during the June 2024 protests, Rex Masai, died from a gunshot to his thigh. This state-sanctioned brutality is not just happening on the streets but also within police stations. Albert Ojwang, a blogger, died while in police custody after having been arrested following a complaint of alleged defamation by the Deputy Inspector General of Police. To add insult to injury, when demonstrations were held to protest Albert’s death, a street vendor selling his wares during the protests was shot at close range. Worryingly, Albert’s death while in police custody is not an isolated case. According to the country’s Independent Policing Oversight Authority, as of June 2025, 20 people had died while in police custody in a period of four months. Civil society organisations have also not escaped the crackdown on dissent against President Ruto’s regime. Goons in support of the government raided the offices of the Kenya Human Rights Commission (KHRC), a prominent NGO, and disrupted a press conference that was calling for an end to arbitrary arrests, enforced disappearances, and extrajudicial killings targeting protesters. Martin Mavenjina, a senior legal advisor at KHRC, was illegally deported from Kenya, a clear escalation of the state’s harassment of human rights defenders. Criminal laws have also been weaponised against those who, through street protests and online activity, are standing up against human rights violations perpetrated by the state or by non-state actors who enjoy state protection. With prominent activists like Boniface Mwangi being unjustifiably charged with terrorism, Ruto’s government stands accused of criminalising dissent.
International posturing and domestic intolerance
The above description of the human rights situation in Kenya, which is by no means exhaustive, exposes the contradiction between the state’s theoretical commitment to human rights norms and actual practice. Kenya’s Constitution and a plethora of regional and international human rights treaties it has ratified guarantee, inter alia: the right to life, the right to freedom of expression, and the right of peaceful assembly, to demonstrate, to picket, and to present petitions to public authorities. In addition, Kenya is currently a member of the UN Human Rights Council, a body tasked with promoting and protecting human rights and addressing situations of human rights violations globally. The country is also playing a lead role in the UN-authorised Multinational Security Support mission to Haiti, with hundreds of Kenyan police officers deployed there to stem gang violence.
Even more perplexing is that those serving in Ruto’s government are individuals who should know better. The President’s Deputy, Professor Kithure Kindiki, earned his doctorate at the well-regarded Centre for Human Rights at the University of Pretoria. The renowned human rights scholar, Professor Makau Mutua, serves as President Ruto’s Advisor on Constitutional Affairs and Human Rights. In his paper published in 2016 and titled ‘Is the Age of Human Rights Over?’, Mutua argues that the human rights ideology has overpromised and underperformed and thus has suffered public fatigue. He further contends that what has dimmed the human rights era and the main deficit of the human rights movement is its ‘failure …to change the abusive proclivities of humans and states’. Given his exemplary track record in advocating for human rights, and now his proximity to the highest executive authority in Kenya, one would expect Mutua to be walking the talk and publicly advising against the widespread human rights abuses by the state. In an increasing repressive environment, his silence is loud and it borders on complicity. This makes it legitimate to question the efficacy of ‘reforming the system from the inside’ as a strategy to influence public policy by academics who join governments.
Countering repression with struggle
How then can the promises of the human rights ideology become tangible for Kenyans? How can they push back against the mockery of the language of human rights, as is presently the case in Kenya, where the state only commits to these values on paper? I suggest that the starting point is not to give up on the ideals of human rights even in repressive contexts. Baxi offers one conception of human rights as the ‘grammar of governance’ and concedes that the underlying assumption in the theory and practice of human rights that they somehow provide constraints on public decision-making power is brittle. Importantly, however, Baxi reminds us that even with this reality, human rights norms and standards continue ‘to provide benchmarks by which forms of barbaric governance, at least, may be severely judged’ [Upendra Baxi, The Future of Human Rights, 2nd edn, OUP 2006, 17].
Beyond the bare minimum of severely judging the Kenyan government’s misrule as Baxi suggests, I propose that the ‘struggle approach to human rights’ as advanced by Christof Heyns is more fitting for the Kenyan context. Heyns contends that ‘human rights are not about asking favours and they are not merely moral or rhetorical concepts; they are guides to action and triggers of resistance against what is perceived as the illegitimate use of power, in particular state power’ [C Heyns ‘A ‘struggle approach’ to human rights’ in Heyns & Stefiszyn (eds) Human rights, peace and justice in Africa: A reader (2006) 16]. This approach closely resembles what Marie-Bénédicte Dembour categorises as the protest school of human rights. As the popular adage goes, ‘a leopard does not change its spots’. Given Ruto’s consistency in his high-handedness in dealing with dissent three years into office, it is naive to expect a sudden change of heart in his government’s approach to governance and disregard for human rights.
With Kenya’s main opposition party now in a constructive coalition with the government, the last line of defence for the country’s democracy is its judiciary, civil society groups, independent media, human rights defenders, and all active citizens online and offline. As Baxi notes, the original authors of human rights are people in struggle and communities of resistance. Given the unprecedented clampdown on the exercise of human rights, Kenya has arguably crossed the Rubicon. This community of resistance therefore only has the option of marching forward and continuously struggling, on and off the streets, for the realisation of human rights. In doing this, its members must, of necessity, continue working in solidarity with each other. The community urgently needs local and international support to not only amplify its efforts to resist the excesses of President Ruto’s regime but also to resource its organising. Nothing will embolden Ruto’s administration more than the silencing of these actors. All who believe in the ideals of human rights, within and outside Kenya, must not let him succeed.
About the Author:
Dr Edward Kahuthia Murimi is an Advocate of the High Court of Kenya. In September 2025, he will commence postdoctoral research at the Amsterdam Centre for International Law, University of Amsterdam. His research interests include international human rights law and the African Union’s human rights standards, processes, and institutions. [kahuthia.edward@gmail.com]
