Have the 10 Amendments Inspired Freedom? Six Foreign Prespectives : KENYA : A Foundation of Political Pluralism

Ilearned of the U.S. Bill of Rights while studying at Oxford University in the early ‘70s. All my professors argued that there cannot be an adequate consideration of any human-rights issue in the common-law world without weighing the American contribution--the Bill of Rights. I believed this then. I believe it today.

But the Kenya Bar Assn., of which I am a member, has been using the U.S. Bill of Rights in a way I did not learn at Oxford but discovered during my human-rights work: as an inspiration to restore multiparty democracy in Kenya.

Kenya became a one-party state in 1982. Since then, bar members have been teaching Kenyans about their constitutional rights and assisting them in court when those rights are challenged by the government. As of Jan. 1, 1990, they were also advising Kenyans on how to restore multiparty democracy in their country.

Earlier this month, Kenya’s one political party decided to end its monopoly on power. The 1982 constitutional amendment that served as the legal basis for its monopoly is expected to be repealed before Christmas. But there remains a disturbing legacy of the 1982 amendment: The Kenya government has earned itself a reputation as a great violator of human rights.

Since June, 1990, the government’s determination to hold onto its one-party system had expressed itself in the increasingly brutal treatment of advocates of multiparty democracy. The world has been stunned by this deplorable turn of events. No fewer than three human-rights reports by various organizations have documented Kenya’s fall from political civility.

The Kenya government’s reaction to the Kenya Bar Assn.’s defense of freedom has been shocking. Human-rights lawyers have been detained without trial, because in the government’s view they are as bad as their clients, the dissidents. In 1987, I spent 9 1/2 months in jail because of my human-rights work. In 1982, another human-rights lawyer, John Khaminwa, was detained without trial. In 1987, three lawyers were similarly detained. Two human-rights lawyers, Mirugi Kariuki and Rumba Kinuthia, are currently facing treason charges. Some have been attacked with stones while under government surveillance.

The choice for these human-rights lawyers is to live with such inconveniences or to risk the bloodshed that would surely follow if they took no action.

The U.S. Bill of Rights has had a more direct impact on Kenya’s political culture. Former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall helped draft the Kenyan bill of rights in 1960. At Kenya’s first constitutional conference, when the decision to have a bill of rights was made, he served as the constitutional adviser to the representatives of the majority of the then-colonized people. The Kenyan bill of rights was derived, in part, from Marshall’s paper on the subject.

The Kenyans now seem on their way to successfully using their bill of rights, inspired by its American counterpart, to restore a government with limits.