Law Society of Kenya condemns police brutality on protesters

Anti-riot police brutally beat up one of the anti-IEBC protestors in Nairobi

Law Society of Kenya has come out to strongly condemn police brutality on CORD protestors who were agitating for the overhaul of IEBC commissioners.

“What Kenyans witnessed on 16th May 2016 is nothing less than a horrendous demonstration of a police force managing lawful protests with techniques that certainly predate the 2010 Constitution and have worrying similarity to pre-independence tactics that Kenyans had become familiar with in the decades that followed,” LSK stated in a press statement.

LSK now wants the police force to be urgently trained on how to facilitate citizen's peaceable and unarmed exercise of Article 37 rights, no matter how raucous, while respecting their inherent dignity and the right to have the same respected and protected (Art 28).

The management of lawful protests by the police must preserve every citizen's rights to freedom and security of person (Article 29).

At the same time the law society maintained that the exercise of right to protest under Article 37 is no excuse for anybody to damage property or to engage in violent conduct. Such behaviour is criminal for which there are legal consequences that the individual must suffer.

“This means the police must be trained to efficiently and safely extract from lawful protests those whose behaviour falls outside Article 37 in a manner that respects even such persons' unlimited right to freedom from torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment (Article 25(a)).”

Police officers have been photographed attacking unarmed and peaceful citizens on the streets of Nairobi and Kisumu.

“The bludgeoning of an apparently unconscious and unresponsive, unarmed man captured by TV cameras is something Kenyans will expect even the Inspector General of Police to condemn and acknowledge as a manifestation of serious and urgent need for the retraining of his forces.”

LSK has recommended that officers who violated the rights of citizens by their brutality must face both disciplinary process and criminal prosecution.

The law society emphasized the need for national dialogue that will help keep this nation peaceful.