1. Kenya has a brand new Constitution.
2. Kenya has a brand new Bill of Rights.
3. Kenya has a brand new Code of Civil Procedure.
4. Kenya does not have trial by jury.
5. Kenya does not have depositions.
6. Kenya passed new employment laws in 2007, but does not have an agency
to oversee enforcement.
7. Most crimes tried at the lower courts are prosecuted by police officers, not
lawyers. (The new Constitution, however, provides for a a new independent
office of the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP), with prosecutions
handled by lawyers.)
8. Judges have incredible power and are largely unaccountable.
9. Police officers have incredible power and are largely unaccountable.
10. Nairobi has 6 schools of law, 3 public and 3 private; over 50% of incoming
law students are female.
#10 makes me smile.
ReplyDeleteThat's great news that women are so well-represented in the law schools! Hopefully the legal infrastructure will support them as lawyers. It's one thing to have so many being educated, but quite another to have the mechanisms in place to actually allow them to succeed in practice. Are any of the judges or police officers women?
ReplyDeleteWe just did an informal tally for LWOB. Of about 400 judges and magistrates in Kenya, about 155, or about 40%, are female. The percentage generally is greater the closer the court is located to Nairobi. I have no formal information about the police, but from my own limited observation and reading the newspaper, it appears very largely male dominated. Very.
ReplyDeleteThis is so interesting. I just returned from spending 3 months living in the slums of Kenya and saw much of this in practise. I'm currently studying legal studies in my Undergrad and actually visited some lower level courts while there. I was shocked but pleased to see that the trial I was sitting it on had a female judge!
ReplyDeleteWould love to hear more about your work in Kenya!
sam.antha@hotmail.com
many females is nice, isn't it? But I personally witnessed points 8 and 9, and saw how police and judges collaborate to extort money from powerless people.. mostly from the powerless, that is less risky. If you're in court, you have to say "I'm guilty", unless you've committed something really bad, like murder. If you plead "not guilty", the trial is adjourned, and you wait for two weeks in a lowest-standard overcrowded jail cell for the next hearing, where it all repeats. Women have the opportunity to be released before the first trial if the "talk nicely" to the police, which means that you'll be passed around the whole police station during the night, and in the morning you can go. I have this from 1st hand account. However, women were not directly forced to "talk nicely", from what she saw..
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