The Kenyan High Court in Nairobi temporarily blocked the government from deploying hundreds of police personnel to Haiti, just days after the UN Security Council’s Oct. 2 vote approving it. The court order issued on Oct. 9, is valid until Oct. 24, after a petition was filed by the Thirdway Alliance, described as a one-man-show run by Dr. Ekuru Aukot. He challenged both the constitutionality and the logic of deploying domestic police on an international mission, when there is a strong terror threat at home.
According to a court document “seen by Reuters,” the order bars Kenyan government officials including the President and his Interior Minister from deploying police officers to Haiti or any other country until Oct. 24. The petitioner further claims that President William Ruto’s attempt to join the geopolitical world order is “not only nonsensical and irrational but unconstitutional.” He alleges that the decision to deploy did not involve public participation; further, it is also unconstitutional, because only the Kenya military can be deployed outside the country, but not police. In a Sept. 28 opinion piece in the Kenyan Star, Willy Mutunga, former Chief Justice of Kenya’s Supreme Court, also denounced the deployment as unconstitutional, and a decision made without the consent of the population.
Sporadic coverage in the Kenyan media predictably focused on the domestic aspects of the filing and ignored the international/constitutional side. The Aukot statement said: “Our brothers and sisters in Sondu [on the Ugandan border] are being killed. Yet our President, for whatever the wisdom is, wants to deploy 1,000 police officers to Haiti.” In a sign of internal dissent, Foreign Minister Alfred Mutua, who had made many exaggerated claims about the timetable of the deployment and its size—reporting it would include 20,000 troops from 50 countries—was “reassigned” last week to the post of Tourism Minister. Kenya’s Internal Security Minister had said nothing about the mission, while Mutua made these public claims.
