CLEAR, Kenya

Begun in 1999 as a project of Kenyan Christian Lawyers’ Fellowship, this project was inspired by the desire and drive of lead advocates Victor Kamau, Kamotho Waiganjo and Timothy Bryant together with a young pupil barrister from the UK, Dan Leader. Dan worked with another pupil, Pip Page as the first interns to the Mombasa office.

Since those early days, cooperation between Kenya and the UK has become more formal and the UK’s contribution has expanded to include donor funding, technical support in the form of library facilities, research and technology and some UK development, training and management expertise.

The results are an expanded project with in-house advocates working more cases, new legal aid offices in Nairobi and Eldoret and a substantial prison ministry working to reduce remand times from their average of 3 to 5 years.

The project’s successes are too numerous to mention them all but include securing ID cards for street children, challenging the lack of proportionality in the definition of robbery with violence, requiring the government to use only senior officers as prosecutors in Magistrates Courts and its latest challenge to the system of “mentions” which effectively substitute a roll call for any meaningful court hearing for months, often years while men women and children are kept in over crowded and unsanitary conditions in prison. CLEAR currently educates an average of approximately 300 prisoners a week, but its aim is to double that figure within the year – subject to funding an additional advocate.

There are numerous stories of individual rescue, including that of a house girl on remand for over a year because her employers wanted to sack her. It was cheaper and easier to accuse her of stealing, knowing this would mean at least 2 years on remand before they could discreetly drop the case. She was released through a CLEAR advocate’s intervention after 12 months. Jacqueline’s story is particularly pertinent when set against the UK cases involving Sally Clarke and Angela Cannings. And at the moment CLEAR, Nairobi is mounting a challenge on behalf of street children who are not being provided the statutory safeguards they should receive under the Kenya Children’s Act 2002.