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{
"id": 1072351,
"url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/1072351/?format=api",
"text_counter": 18,
"type": "speech",
"speaker_name": "Sen. Cheruiyot",
"speaker_title": "",
"speaker": {
"id": 13165,
"legal_name": "Aaron Kipkirui Cheruiyot",
"slug": "aaron-cheruiyot"
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"content": "Access to justice remains to be one of the founding principles of a modern working democracy, where citizens every time when they feel their rights have been threatened, should know there is an easier way through which they can be preserved. The Covid-19 pandemic has presented almost every fragment of society with a very difficult and unchartered scenario with regards to exercising of their mandate, be they businesses. You can see the struggle. Our courts and the Judiciary are not strangers to this challenge. This House is, therefore, being presented with a Petition that I feel we should seriously consider and perhaps, later on, share out findings with, first of all, the Petitioners. This is also one the unique scenarios where after the Petition has been considered, the findings ought to be shared with our colleagues in the National Assembly, especially because they control the power of the purse in the Republic. Under funding of our Judiciary is a systemic challenge, which if we do not address as a House, is going to pose a serious threat to the rule of law in this country. The fact that you know that when courts of law are not able to meet physically, they do not have a national platform upon which they can conduct court hearings and, therefore, sometimes it is left to who you know in the Judiciary and whose email address you have, the Registrar and such issues. Those should not be things that we are doing in the 21st Century. As Parliament, for example, I know for a fact that we are trying to secure an online presence system that will allow us to transact our business, either physically as we are doing right now, or in instances as happened twice in the last year, where with the increasing cases of Coronavirus, we had to take a break and operate only virtually. Then, as a House, our business then continues uninterrupted. Unfortunately, the Judiciary does not have that kind of luxury. Many of the times when they place their requests, before the Budget Committee of the National Assembly, they are left perhaps with only salaries and enough just to meet their recurrent expenditure, and very little to do any meaningful development. We know that there are counties that do not have the requisite number of courts. Secondly, there are people who have to travel such long distances because of the geographical nature of some of the counties and the terrain they have to take for somebody to present a petition either before the High Court, a Magistrates Court or the Court of Appeal. It is a high time as a country we made a keen determination to understand that the same way we fight for access to health, education, good roads and clean water, access to justice is a basic human right that we need, as Parliament, to ensure that it has been dispensed equally. There should not be a scenario where certain Kenyans can easily access justice, for example, those within Nairobi or any of the former Provincial headquarters, yet there are citizens in other parts of the country that cannot access it. In this report that will come to the House and the Committee that will consider this Petition, it would be important for them for example to furnish this House with a report of the ratio of citizen to judicial officers’ ratio in the various counties. It cannot be that in certain counties within a short proximity, one is able to access the services of the Judiciary, yet in others it would take one perhaps a day or two day’s journey."
}