Professor Philip Alston is the UN's special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary, or arbitrary executions. As everybody must now know, it has been his job, these last nine days, to find some facts about what turns out to be widespread extrajudicial murder. 

It is difficult to see how he could have done his job better. His media strategy has beeen both excellent and well-executed:having the KNCHR release their report the day before -- and a reportwith such compelling evidence -- guaranteed the credibility andpolitical importance of his mission's report. You can find a copy of the press statement with his preliminary findings here ; it's difficult to avoid despair and disgust when faced with the conclusions Alston states with Australian directness. Some of them follow.

In memory of our own Ngethu Star,

I have received detailed and convincing reports of countless individual killings. It is clear from the many interviews that I conducted that the police are free to kill at will. Sometimes they do so for reasons of a private or personal nature. Sometimes they kill in the context of extortion, or of a ransom demand. Often they kill in the name of crime control, but in circumstances where they could readily make an arrest. My final report will review the evidence in some detail. One example will suffice here. I met with the father and brother of Dr. James Ng'ang'a Kariuki Muiruri, a 29 year old man with three law degrees from the United Kingdom and who had been teaching there. He was killed by police on 24 January 2009 in Nairobi. After a disagreement at a hotel, a police officer stopped the car James and his brother were in, and ordered James to handcuff himself. When he asked why he was being arrested, James was shot three times. The only exceptional things about the case were that James was the son of a former Member of Parliament, and the incident had been witnessed. Otherwise it followed a common pattern. The police officer responsible for the shooting filed a report that a bank robber and Mungiki member had been killed, thus invoking the magic formula designed to ensure that no one would question the need to shoot the suspect dead.

In short, the Kenyan police are a law unto themselves and they kill often and with impunity, except in those rare instances where their actions are caught on film or otherwise recorded by outsiders in ways that cannot be dismissed.

The demand for the dismissal of the A-G (especially ironic since Amos Wako is a former Special Rapporteur on, yes, you guessed right, extrajudicial...):

In my final report I will explain in detail the shortcomings of the two key component parts of the criminal justice system apart from the police. They are the Office of the Attorney-General and the judiciary. While I was unable to meet with the Attorney-General I did meet with the Director of Public Prosecutions. The exchange, reproduced in full in the Waki Commission report, between Justice Waki and Attorney-General Amos Wako, provides a vivid illustration of the latter's role as the chief obstacle to prosecuting anyone in authority for extrajudicial executions. He has presided for a great many years over a system that is clearly bankrupt in relation to dealing with police killings and has done nothing to ensure that the system is reformed. Public statements lamenting the system's shortcomings have been utterly unsupported by any real action. In brief, Mr Wako is the embodiment in Kenya of the phenomenon of impunity.

The judiciary is the other stumbling block in achieving justice both in relation to accused criminals and to police accused of killing unlawfully. While the Chief Justice was of the view that the courts are fundamentally sound and that any problems of corruption are being adequately dealt with, this view was not shared by the vast majority of Kenyans with whom I spoke. I was told on innumerable occasions that "justice" can be bought by approaching a magistrate's or judge's "broker", and paying a sum to fix the case. The current Judicial Service Commission has done little to improve the judiciary. The broad concerns, embodied in the Waki Commission's approach and shared by almost all observers, that the existing court system could not conceivably bring justice in relation to post-election violence matters stands as an extraordinary indictment of the bankruptcy of the judicial system as it currently stands. In the medium term there appears to be no alternative but to institute a root and branch reform of the judiciary, perhaps through the establishment of a Constitutional Court which would seek to lead and constrain the rest of the system.

Read the whole thing , carefully.

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