2022 ANNUAL REPORT
The Missing Voices Coalition whose membership includes 15 human rights organizations both local and international has been collecting data on police killings and enforced disappearances since 2019. The 2022 report was launched on Friday 24th March 2023 in the form of a panel discussion by partners and keynote addresses by distinguished guests that include Ambassadors from Germany, Britain, the United States, and the European Union.
The issue of police killings and enforced disappearances in Kenya has slowly evolved into one of the major human rights violations particularly since security agents are grappling with threats of terrorism and other violent crimes that allow them the justify the inevitable use of force.
However, in many cases where police use deadly force communities have continuously claimed that they are being targeted for arrest, killing, and disappearance since they live in informal settlements and are routinely criminalized for being poor. Many of the killings are attributed to anti-crime operations in poor neighborhoods especially in urban areas like Nairobi.
These continuous killings and disappearances have eroded the respect that communities have for the police and for the criminal justice system in general since they see it as a tool of oppression instead of a means to achieve justice. They see justice as only a preserve of the rich and powerful and this has led to a lack of cooperation between members of the community and security agents.
As a result, Missing Voices and its partners have been documenting cases of police killings and enforced disappearances in a bid to understand the underlying causes of killings by recording among others, names, ages, sex, and occupation of victims in addition to the circumstances of the incidents. This data then informs the actions of the coalition going forward.
