Sign the petition for Mau Mau reparations

London-based solicitors, Leigh, Day & Co, have been instructed by the Kenya Human Rights Commission to issue a claim for compensation against the British government on behalf of the Mau Mau veterans. These now elderly Kenyans were assaulted, tortured and unlawfully imprisoned for a number of years during the brutal repression of the Mau Mau movement by the British government which took place in the 1950s and early 1960s.

The Kenya Human Rights Commission has now documented 40 cases of castration, severe sexual abuses and unlawful detention, which were carried out by officers of the British government. The actual number of Kenyans who suffered this barbaric treatment at the hands of British officers in fact runs into their thousands.

In recent years, following exhaustive research by historians, it has become clear that far from being the acts of a few rogue soldiers, the torture and inhuman and degrading treatment of Kenyans during the Emergency Period (1950s to early 1960s) resulted from policies which were sanctioned at the highest levels of government in London. It was only after the tireless work of campaigners over a number of years and the revelation of the massacre of 11 Kenyans at the .
* Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/.

NOTES

[1] For example, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights [1948] and the European Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms [1950]