The Constitution of Kenya 2010 provides for a comprehensive Bill of Rights, which guarantees its citizens fundamental rights and freedoms while protecting them from excessive use of force by police officers.
Article 38 of the Constitution, read together with Article 81(e)(ii), safeguards everyone’s right to exercise their political rights, either as voters or candidates, in free and fair elections devoid of violence.
In the just-ended general election, security agencies have been praised for a commendable venture that largely witnessed peaceful voting, with minimal but containable incidences of violence.
Substantially, the dialogue on police and human rights often concentrates on how citizens’ rights are violated by the police. Attention is rarely given to the rights of police, which are often violated through multiple channels and by numerous actors.
The role of security personnel remains essential. Police are the frontline defenders of human rights. Their powers are intended to be exercised to guarantee the security of citizens, the safety of property and peace in communities and nations.
It is noticeable that the country is experiencing incidents of state and private security officers shooting and killing each other, family members and themselves in methodical bizarre circumstances.
Police work remains daunting and vicious; police officers routinely encounter people violating or intending to violate the rights of other citizens within communities. They are under pressure from communities and victims to ensure that their security and safety are guaranteed within reasonable time, and to ensure that justice is visibly carried out in order to demonstrate that crime does not pay.
The rights of the police are violated by legislation and political environments that deny them professional autonomy and adequate resources that commensurate with functions and occupational risks; engender victimisation by fellow officers, especially superiors; promote corruption and nepotism in promotion and postings; and tolerate unwarranted assault and insult by civilians.
Promoting safety and respecting the rights of citizens is a thin line of balance and a source of tension in the police service in a system where the rights of suspects are privileged over community safety.
The reform agenda within the police service is gradually yielding the desired changes. But it remains plagued by diverse challenges and constraints that have structural and institutional origins that also promote police misconduct.
They are under-resourced, hence, denied the personnel and resources for surveillance, intelligence and investigation. These shortfalls continue to predispose the security personnel to extrajudicial killings, unlawful arrests, detention and torture.
The police officers are poorly trained, equipped and remunerated. They are prohibited by legislation from organising and pursuing their interests through police associations or unions.
Within the security agencies, there is an abundance of internal abuses and violations. Police officers are being harassed, intimidated and denied their rights by their colleagues, including their superiors.
The struggle for rights-based policing must be embedded in a wider struggle for social, economic and political rights and justice. Focusing advocacy on rights-based policing without greater attention to the structural economic and political determinants of injustice, inequality, exclusion and the denial of fundamental rights more broadly is focusing on the symptoms and not on the causes of chronic social, political and economic dysfunctions.
There is a need to re-emphasise and allocate more resources for mental and emotional state training of the men and women in the security service, their general welfare, counselling, chaplaincy, conflict of interest and guidelines for engagement in trade and business.
Reform drivers should foster virtues and programmes that factor and promote the rights of security personnel.
Founder, Integrated Development Network. [email protected]
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