Reports of extrajudicial killings, torture and harassment by Kenya’s security forces are false, Foreign Affairs CS Amina Mohamed has said.
She dismissed reports by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and the US State Department raising concerns about abuses.
“They’re making it up. That’s all false,” Mohamed said yesterday.
“Interview them. Honestly they haven’t talked to me. I haven’t seen the report. They haven’t spoken to anybody.”
Speaking on Al Jazeera TV’s “UpFront” programme, the CS defended police, the military and government security agencies against allegations of harassing Somalis in Kenya and violating rights of refugees.
“We are not violating any obligations. If we were, the whole world would have come down like a tonne of bricks right on our heads,” she told host Mehdi Hassan.
Mohamed said the ongoing repatriation formula for Somali refugees is within the tripartite agreement signed between Kenya, Somalia and the UN refugee agency.
“We have a tripartite agreement that we entered into in [November] 2013 – not yesterday, not today, not the day before,” she said.
International and local human rights organisations have documented widespread and systematic cases of extrajudicial killings and enforced disappearances.
In 2014, the Independent Medico-Legal Unit recorded 199 cases of extrajudicial killings, and 97 by October 2015, including 85 summary executions by police officers and the Kenya Wildlife Service.
In its ‘Error of Fighting Terror with Terror’ report released in September last year, the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights, a state agency, documented 120 cases of human rights violations.
They included widespread, systematic and well-coordinated arbitrary arrests, extortion, illegal detention, torture, killings and disappearances.
In its report ‘Deaths and Disappearances: Abuses in Counter-terrorism Operations in Northeastern Kenya’ launched in July, Human Rights Watch recorded 34 cases of extrajudicial killings.
