Human Rights Watch on Thursday urged the Independent Policing and Oversight Authority (IPOA) to continue holding police accountable.
While releasing its report on the human rights trends of 2022 across Africa, the lobby group acknowledged that IPOA has taken great strides in ending police brutality.
“During the 2013 elections, thousands of cases of police brutality and killings were reported but only 17 cases have been prosecuted today,” the organisation’s East Africa Director Otieno Namwaya said.
Namwaya further said IPOA should not shun prosecuting cases that are political.
Namwaya said that he had seen the same trend across East Africa and called for accountability across the region.
In the report, it was found that East Africa experienced incidences of lack of media freedom, kidnappings and forced disappearances as well as police extrajudicial killings.
Namwaya reported that Kenya particularly had a number of extrajudicial killings in 2022.
“Kenya had several cases of forced disappearances in the Coast region, Northern Kenya and Nairobi,” he said.
Namwaya said that the biggest case of police killings and disappearances was the discovery of bodies in River Yala.
“Over 30 bodies were recorded as retrieved from River Yala. However, the number of people dumped in the river remains to be unknown,” he said.
He said that residents of the area had been retrieving bodies from the river months prior to media attention over the issue.
