I will readily admit that her invitation was terribly tempting. Upon consideration, however, I concluded that accepting the invitation would convert my fairly well articulated thesis into a spectacle revolving around the person of the good Ms Patel. I am sure there are many excellent attributes to commend her, but she is, in no way the subject hereof.

And that sums up the problem with the human rights agenda today: it is a most confounding reductio ad absurdum. The fellows there have managed to reduce the concept of right to a most useless distortion that has no basis in good jurisprudence, philosophy, morality or other acceptable normative parameter. Thus, the human rights characters who assailed my article with venom, pejorative, invective and other crudity misconstrued my article to be a call for mass murder, a propagation of misogyny and an unjustified attack on the Human Rights movement. Most responses comprised ad hominem attacks of no intellectual merit whatsoever, while others, claiming to point out inconsistencies in my central thesis, found themselves in a spectacular logical contretemps.

Dearest friends, O What A Tangled Web We Weave indeed! A cardinal precept of reasoning, logic and debate is that unless you are before a court of law,the validity of your interlocutor's argument is never diminished nor affected howsoever by attacks upon his person. Indeed, calling your adversary a demi-evolue, casting aspersions on their educational qualifications, political affiliation, ethnicity, etc is an arrant commission of the fallacy of relevance. As a result of which I still assert my principal argument, which must be taken to have been conceded, in the absence of a cogent counter argument.

Which was this: How is it that over the years, the human rights movement has consistently entrenched themselves as the implacable advocates of the most hideous of criminals? Why are we more likely to hear a human rights violation being protested in support of a violent robber, rapist, murderer, thief and other stragglers in the moral contest, than we are in defence of villagers threatened by crime, of the victims of the lionised reprobate's brutality? Why did the murder of the King'ong'o Seven or whatever they were called constitute such a grievous catastrophe, whereas the crimes for which they were on the Death Row were somehow insignificant?

In Kenya today, the crime of treason appears to have been extinguished by the nascent acceptance of ideological pluralism, or, more likely, the appreciation that all the diverse political voices are after one thing, constituting no threat, but a diversified consensus. So it is safe to argue that all people on the death row have been adjudged, beyond reasonable doubt to have so heiniously violated others' rights that they deserve to die for it.Yet whilst widows and orphans abound in silent suffering amongst us, thanks to the criminals, very few of whom ever get arraigned before court, and fewer of whom get convicted, the death row convict is untouchable, a holy cow, some sacred totem of the Human Rights movement.

When a human rights type therefore claims that they are under attack, I am severely baffled. Nearly everyone in gainful employment asserts and defends a human right or other. Teachers, principally, are the custodians of the Right to Education, without which the Right to Freedom of Speech and Conscience cannot viably exist, and the right to Life and Property severely threatened. A teacher's right to equitable pay, acceptable working conditions and the exercise of his intellectual freedom, therefore, is a cardinal requisite to all the other rights which the teacher defends every day of his life.

Similarly, a healthcare professional, including doctors, pharmacists, nurses, anaethesists, physiotherapists, nutritionists and so forth constitute the vanguard of the Right To Life. Appurtenant rights might include the right to medical care/healthcare, the Right to Freedom from Inhuman /Degrading Treatment and the right to the integrity of the person. When the ministers for Medical Services and Health and Sanitation cause a paralysis in the health sector, impeding the good work of the professionals under their remit, they impinge on a most vital (pun intended) human right.

Likewise, the policeman. He must put his life on the line everyday to protect our property and lives. He is a direct costodian to The Right To Life and Property. I have said before that as a country, we treat our policemen most deplorably. When his gun is rudimentary in comparison to the thug's Uzi and AK 47, when the curriculum at Kiganjo does not sufficiently equip him with the forensic and hi tech knowhow to enable him protect us excellently, it is the taxpayer and the government, not the policemen, who violate the citizens' rights to life and to property. It means that by playing with policemen's working conditions, we trivialise our most omportant rights, like children playing with fire. A robbery therefore constitutes a human rights' violation. The mutilations and murders by SLDF and Mungiki are human rights violations.

When the armed forces were deployed to sort out the aggressors in Mount Elgon, the state was exercising a dual mandate: to protect itself and its citizens from internal aggression and to vouchsafe threatened human rights. That is why the wananchi abjectly beseeched the officers to stay awhile when their tour was complete. Yet the human rights people now talk about genocide and mass murder and gross human rights violations and torture and so forth in relation to the extermination of armed aggressors.

Even the lawyer, prosecuting, defending and adjudicating, guarantees fundamental human rights - to Due Process of The Law, to Equality Before the Law, to A Fair Trial, etc. If one side of the triad is weakened, for example by the use of blatantly ill-trained police prosecutors, the delicate balance is upset, with the result that the victim is poorly represented, whereas the abuser is triumphant.When Human Rights people take the abuser's side, snapping at the prosecutors' heels at every turn, obstructing them while doing their best under difficult circumstances, the victim's abuse is compounded.

Clearly therefore, there are many sides in every human rights paradigm. A human rights defender, like justice, ought not to take sides for human rights to be effectively exercised, upheld and defended. It would best serve a relevant role by articulating human rights in broad, inclusive, purposive-utilitarian terms. As I said earlier, the human rights movement made an extremely reckless and unconscionable decision and therefore took the wrong side in electing to perpetually side with the criminal.

The human rights movement in Kenya exists on the following cardinal proposotions,

1. It is the duty of the state to protect citizens and their property.
2. It is the duty of the state to prevent, apprehend and prosecute criminals.
3. The state is the biggest violator of human rights.
4. The only role for the human rights movement, its raison d'etre, is to protect the citizen from the state.

The only instance when the citizen requires the aid of the human rights movement is, therefore, when he has fallen afoul of the law. We must understand that the only means for the state to articulate and execute its mandate is through law. Thus the state is the executor of the Social Contract: upon relinquishing our right to bear arms, and paying tax, and other political prerogatives for the sake of the greater good, the state guaranteees us in turn, through a penal and civil code, the protection of our rights. That code, whatever your jurisprudence may be, is what we commonly refer to and understand as Law. Hence, a person afoul of the law is necessarily one who has somehow impeded the state's mandate or negated its guarantee by violating another's fundamental human rights. For the human rights types therefore to devise and assume as its mandate the defence of such a person, even, as the state in pursuance of the violated mandate assures him due process and fair trial, is most unacceptable, untenable and immoral.

There is nothing wrong with the civil society contriving to ensure state accountability within a democratic context. Indeed, that is what we require. However, when the human rights movement resolves to dedicate itself wholly to the abnegation of the Social Contract, to melavolently interloping in the protection of others' rights, to operating in league with the Dark Side, to never commit itself to a positive act of improving the state's efficacy in a human rights context and rather undermine, sabotage, obstruct and enervate it, it begins to assume a role absolutely antithetical to the entire concept of human rights.

And that is what I must conclude in the final analysis - that the human rights movement in Kenya does not understand, or is viciously opposed to the protection of human rights. The choices we make so often contradict our most ardent avocations. Thus, by eternally mollycoddling vicious criminals, the 'human rights defenders ' render vain and useless all their protestations of fundamental human rights, constitutional violations and the evolution of a progressive society. Teachers' strikes are human rights crusades. Police working conditions and terms of service are grave human rights issues. The strengthening of all our penal institutions, to empower, not weaken, the state's ability to detect, apprehend, prosecute and punish most condignly, criminals and other offenders, is a fundamental human rights imperative. In all those instances, no input is forthcoming from the human rights movement. Not a peep. Not a squeak. No human rights organisation or group has taken up the minimum wages agenda, yet its unenforceability comprises a vast human rights abuse. Neither have they helped the Government and the citizens of this country in representing the rights of teachers, policemen, midwives, prosecutors and detectives as human rights matters of vital significance.

When human rights as both concept and enterprise is thus appropriately expanded, one will appreciate thet Anglo Leasing, Goldenberg and other pilferages present immense human rights implications. So do the anarchy and vacuity of parliament, the woeful road carnage statistics, and the deterioration of the Eldoret-Kapsabet-Chavakali road. In that instance, one properly sees Pattni as not potential presidential material, but as an atrocious conniver. However, this appreciation is absent, substituted with the 'human rights defenders' obstinate fixation with the blood and gore dimension of it.

All people who serve in education, healthcare, armed forces, civil service are therefore important human rights facilitators, enforcers and defenders. To attempt to seclude the definition of human rights from its relevant social context, in order to validate and elevate the hysterical comings and goings of marginal, shadowy, redundant, inappropriate, cut-and-paste proposal-writing, grant-siphoning, workshop-attending,strident tin-gods, is to minimise and utterly denigrate the entire notion of a human rights movement. By depriving it of a utilitarian rationale, particularly by going counter to the 'greatest good to the largest number' prerequisite, human rights praxis takes on the visage of another cartel operating on the margins of society. Human rights today, in Kenya, as articulated by the trenchant 'defenders' is sinonymous with nuisance: trite, superfluous, and irrelevant at best, antisocial abetters and condoners of crime at worst.

Thus, the temptation to spit at a human rights type's face is understandably acute.