Article by PBI-Canada

On August 18, the Peace Brigades International-Kenya Project posted:

“Yesterday, PBI-Kenya and the Social Justice Centres Working Group [the collective leadership of 24 social justice centres across Kenya] met with Peace Cop [a peace building program of the Administration Police Kenya] to discuss the security concerns of communities, community dialogues, and the relationship between the police and community members in Nairobi’s urban settlements.”

PBI-Kenya works with the Social Justice Centres Working Group, notably the Mathare Social Justice Centre and Dandora Community Justice Centre. It is also part of the Missing Voices network and the Police Reforms Working Group network.

The Kenyan newspaper The Star recently reported: “More than 100 people [are] reported to have been killed by police since January 2020 according to Missing Voices, a consortium of community, national and international human rights defenders committed to ending enforced disappearances and extrajudicial killings in Kenya.”

That article highlights: “Missing Voices reports that 712 people have been killed by the police or reported missing since 2007 with only 26 having been charged with a crime for these cases which include enforced disappearances. These cases are more rampant in poorer neighbourhoods.”

Earlier this year, the Missing Voices network released its 2019 Annual Report on the State of Police Killings and Enforced Disappearances in Kenya that noted that Kenyan police had killed 107 people in 2019, most of whom were young men living in the informal settlements.

Furthermore, the Mathare Social Justice Centre report Who Is Next? A Participatory Action Research Report Against the Normalization of Extrajudicial Executions in Mathare documented that the police had killed more than 50 people in Mathare and a total of 803 people in Kenya between 2013 and 2015

On June 8, the Mathare Social Justice Centre tweeted: “Mathare says abolish the police! Power to the people. We want dignified lives not ‘good relations with the police’. Mathare residents demanding justice and an end to police killings now.”

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