State-sanctioned human rights violations in Kenya: countering repression with resistance
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 Leave a comment
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.
Eritrean Independence: Form over substance
Posted: 10 November, 2015 Filed under: Lebogang Maxelegu | Tags: arbitrary arrests, Armed Struggle, detention, Eritrea, Ethiopian rule, human rights violations, independence, national conscription, oppression, PFDJ, refuge, revolution 1 Comment
Author: Lebogang Maxelegu
Assistant Researcher, Centre for Human Rights, University of Pretoria
Eritreans observed the 54th Anniversary of the Beginning of the Armed Struggle for Independence on 1 September 2015. While the success of the armed struggle in attaining independence from Ethiopian rule should have been a cause for celebration for the whole nation, it was instead characterised with mixed emotions.
On the one hand, the ruling party, the People’s Front for Democracy and Justice (PFDJ) and some Eritreans, embraced and glorified the country’s protracted 30 year war with Ethiopia-describing it as one of Africa’s formidable revolutions. On the other hand, many Eritreans, in particular those who fled, have by implication of their seeking refuge in other countries, expressed their discontentment with the current socio-political landscape in which widespread, systematic and gross human rights violations are perpetrated with impunity.
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