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{
"id": 65122,
"url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/65122/?format=api",
"text_counter": 410,
"type": "speech",
"speaker_name": "Mr. M. Kilonzo",
"speaker_title": "The Minister for Justice, National Cohesion and Constitutional Affairs",
"speaker": {
"id": 47,
"legal_name": "Mutula Kilonzo",
"slug": "mutula-kilonzo"
},
"content": "The reason, again, is to say to my country that this law is not a personal property; anybody who has ideas that can come forth, please, bring them. Eng. Gumbo, again, I thank you. I welcome your comments. I will look forward to the draft that you will present to amend Article 18 and then we can discuss it. I accept that any regulations made under Clause 47 be required by law to be tabled in the House, because, yet again, this Judiciary is everything to us. Mr. Muthama, my good brother, I want to assure you that I accept that the three years that we have put is inadequate. Several other Members, including Dr. Eseli, have taken the same position. I agree with them. I am thinking that we amend the clause to require that the first Chairs of these important offices serve for three years, and thereafter for five years. I am unable to find any justification for recruiting judges from outside Kenya, except for the vetting of judges and magistrates. For the information of the country, if you recall, for the purposes of constitutional review, we established a special court for resolving disputes. We hired nine individuals, six Kenyans and three foreigners. You will be very surprised that during the course of the disputes arising from the referendum, four cases were filled. All those cases were determined by the Kenyans. The foreign judges did not participate in any of the decisions that enabled this country to overcome the challenge of disputes. Therefore, Mr. Muthama, I sincerely share your ideas with you, but I think it is also important to know that, for purposes of vetting judges, I will continue insisting, please, allow us to have three senior judges from outside, so that they can help us to come to terms with principles like the âBangalore Principles of Judicial Conductâ. I am thanking Dr. Eseliâs real beautiful brains; he gave me an idea. I think I made a mistake. In establishing the National Council on Administration of Justice (NCAJ), although you point out that we will have an Inspector-General of Police, we have designed this law so that for the time being â because some clauses of the Constitution have been postponed and others suspended until the next General Election, and particularly since we have not passed the law on the police â I beg your forbearance that you leave it the way it is until such a time. After we appoint the Inspector-General then we can do this very minor amendment to reflect the law. However, please, allow me to ask you to consider and agree that in this NCAJ a mistake has been made by my advisors, the CIC and myself. We have overlooked the fact that in Kenya we have a witness protection agency. Some of the challenges that we have, including post-election violence is that, as a country, the witness protection agency has not yet been accepted by the country, it has not been funded and it has not even found its way to the Cabinet so that the principles and the policy, other than the law can be embraced. While thanking hon. Eseli on this item, I want to tell him that I agree that Deputy Registrars shall be appointed, particularly for the county courts and for the others in the headquarters. But as a Minister, I want to tell you that on my own, I am going to bring an amendment on the National Council on Administration of Justice to seek that the witness protection agency be included so that even the judges and the other departments represented can take account of the issues and the challenges facing the witness protection."
}