
Geneva, 16 December
2016 (OMCT) - It took Samwel Mohochi two
years of legal battles to clear his grandfather's name after the
seventy-year-old was picked up on his way out of church and shot by the
police for allegedly trying to disarm an officer during the arrest. He does not
want it to be as hard for others to win their case.
"I felt that I
needed to make a contribution to those people who might not necessarily be able
to afford legal representation, those voiceless people to whom the system can
be so unjust," said Mohochi, explaining what drove him to defend the human
rights of others.
Today a lawyer with
the Supreme Court of Kenya and an international advocate before the United
Nations Human Rights Council and other treaty monitoring bodies, when he began
his work Kenya was an autocratic State that denied the existence of torture.
Yet it soon became apparent that the State had specifically designed facilities
to torture political prisoners.
Kenya has changed
over time. While the torture chambers are now gone and the State acknowledges
that torture and extrajudicial killings do occur, it argues they are not
carried out systematically as the result of a policy, but only by a few rotten
apples. When Mohochi started his human rights work, the torture victims and
survivors he helped were mostly academics, lawyers and doctors who were
politically dissenting with the State’s actions. Today, it is not political
prisoners who are targeted, but the marginalized, the disenfranchised and the
economically disempowered, according to Mohochi.
"The unemployed
youth, the poor, those who earn less than one dollar a day, you'll find that
those are the people who are more prone to suffer from torture," he
explained, stating that what is occurring is tantamount to a criminalization of
poverty.
A big lesson to
society
Mohochi has
nonetheless seen progress over time that gives him hope, and the small gains
achieved by human rights defenders are slowly building. He explains that human
rights defenders in Kenya were for instance successful in removing the power of
police officials to extract confessions from suspects and in ensuring that
coroners now undertake investigations into cases of extrajudicial killings.
Those are key first steps towards redress.
He believes that the message
that his works sends to the public is vital. Now after several years of work,
and convictions against police officers, the public is more informed about its
right. Police officers and security agents are being charged, whether this
results in a prison sentence or not, showing that violence against civilians is
unjust. Mohochi sees this as a "big lesson to society".
"When some of us
started this work, the public did not realize that the police are not allowed
to mistreat you."
Yet what Mohochi describes
as his greatest achievement so far is not the change of mind-set on the part of
the general public but of many police officers. By investigating violations and
punishing culprits, human rights defenders help remove the shield of impunity
that so far protected the rotten apples, leaving these officials who abuse
human rights isolated – just like the victims are when in the hands of cowardly
torturers. Ironic. To these people he says:
"When we get
hold of you, you are alone, the Government will not protect you. You will lose
your job and go to jail."
This article is part
of a series of 10 profiles to commemorate International Human Rights Day, 10
December, and to recognize the vital role of human rights defenders worldwide.
To see the campaign
video, please click here.
OMCT
wishes to thank the Republic and Canton of Geneva and the OAK Foundation for
their support. Its content is the sole responsibility of OMCT and should in no
way be interpreted as reflecting the view(s) of the supporting institutions.
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